Hints and Helps 



FOR THE 



Christian Life 



BY 



/ 

WAYLAND HOYT, D. D. 



— HfoA 



NEW YORK ! 

WARD & DRUMMOND, 

Successors to U. D. Ward, 

Il6 NASSAU STREET. 



/?PT> 







Copyright, 1880, 

BY 

WARD & DRUMMOND. 



TO MY MOTHER, 

WHOSE SWEET PERSUASIONS 

TURNED MY FEET 

INTO THE PATHS OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, 

THIS LITTLE BOOK 

IS DEDICATED. 



IN the making this small volume I have 
had in mind the hour of quiet and 
devotion. From among many articles 
which I have contributed to the religious 
press, I have grouped these, specially 
bearing upon the principles and the prac- 
tice of the Christian Life. That Life needs 
nurture. That some may find at least 
suggestions of that nurture in these pages, 
is my hope and prayer. 

WAYLAND HOYT. 

Brooklyn, N. Y., Feb., 1880, 



CONTENTS 





PAGE 


The Nearness of God in Christ . ♦ 


I 


Christ's Feeling Toward Us 


5 


Grace Sufficient For Us 


li 


Christ With Us „ 


16 


Dead, but Yet Alive 


21 


The Secret of a True Life .... 


s 27 


The Motive of the Christian Life 


i 33 


A Soul On the Way Toward Light . 


. 37 


The Joyfulness of the Christian Life 


. 42 


Tribulation , : 


. 48 


The True Treatment of Chastisement 


5i 


Divine and Human Energy . . * 


■ 55 


The Shut Door 


. 60 


Appropriation of God i 


, 66 


Borrowing Trouble ...... 


73 


Variable Christians 


77 


The World 


81 



viii. CONTENTS 


• 








Besetting Sins 86 


Resistance to Temptation . 








92 


Saints in Sardis . 








■ 97 


Triumph Over the Future . 








, 102 


When Faith is Tried . 








, no 


The Parable of the Talents 








113 


True Worship . 








123 


Faithfulness in Humble Places 








127 


Difficult Duty . 








131 


Religion in the Home 








. 136 


Religion and Home Life . 








140 


A Chance for Service 








144 


With Both Hands Earnestly 








149 


The Victory of Faith . 








157 


A Common Error 








1 60 


Christ Our Advocate 








164 


The Father's House . 








172 



THE NEARNESS OF GOD IN CHRIST, 

GOD is beyond my comprehension. His 
glory is like the sun, too dazzling for 
my vision. If I were to be admitted into 
His directer presence I should be smitten 
down and confounded. Even the seraphim 
can only endure the blazing of His close 
light as they reverently veil their faces 
with their wings. When I think of God — ■ 
the Absolute, the Infinite — I can only say, 
"Thy knowledge is too wonderful for me." 
"Thy judgments are a great deep/' 

There are some plants which grow right 
up, in their own sturdy self-sufficiency. 
There are others which can only clasp and 
climb. The human soul is like the clinging 
plant ; it droops except there be some 
strong trellis to uphold it. 

In order that my soul grow loftily it 

i 



IN the making this small volume I have 
had in mind the hour of quiet and 
devotion. From among many articles 
which I have contributed to the religious 
press, I have grouped these, specially 
bearing upon the principles and the prac- 
tice of the Christian Life. That Life needs 
nurture. That some may find at least 
suggestions of that nurture in these pages, 
is my hope and prayer. 

WAYLAND HOYT. 

Brooklyn, N. Y., Feb., 1880, 



CONTENTS 





PAGE 


The Nearness of God in Christ . * 


I 


Christ's Feeling Toward Us 


5 


Grace Sufficient For Us ... 


ii 


Christ With Us „ 


. i6 


Dead, but Yet Alive 


. 21 


The Secret of a True Life .... 


i 27 


The Motive of the Christian Life 


. 33 


A Soul On the Way Toward Light . 


. 37 


The Joyfulness of the Christian Life 


. 42 


Tribulation , , 


. 48 


The True Treatment of Chastisement 


5i 


Divine and Human Energy . . 6 


. 55 


The Shut Door *.♦.*. 


. 60 


Appropriation of God i 


, 66 


Borrowing Trouble ..,,,, 


13 


Variable Christians ..,..< 


77 


The World 


81 



viii. CONTENTS 










Besetting Sins 86 


Resistance to Temptation . 








92 


Saints in Sardis . 








- 97 


Triumph Over the Future . 








102 


When Faith is Tried . 








no 


The Parable of the Talents 








113 


True Worship . 








123 


Faithfulness in Humble Places . 








127 


Difficult Duty . 








131 


Religion in the Home 








136 


Religion and Home Life . 








140 


A Chance for Service 








144 


With Both Hands Earnestly 








149 


The Victory of Faith . 








157 


A Common Error 








1 60 


Christ Our Advocate 








164 


The Father's House . 








172 



THE NEARNESS OF GOD IN CHRIST. 

GOD is beyond my comprehension. His 
glory is like the sun, too dazzling for 
my vision, If I were to be admitted into 
His directer presence I should be smitten 
down and confounded. Even the seraphim 
can only endure the blazing of His close 
light as they reverently veil their faces 
with their wings. When I think of God— 
the Absolute, the Infinite— I can only say, 
"Thy knowledge is too wonderful for me." 
"Thy judgments are a great deep/' 

There are some plants which grow right 
up, in their own sturdy self-sufficiency/ 
There are others which can only clasp and 
climb. The human soul is like the clinging 
plant ; it droops except there be some 
strong trellis to uphold it. 

In order that my soul grow loftily it 



2 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, 

must have some near, yet high, support 
which, with its poor faculties, it may lay 
hold on. 

What do I need, then ? I need God near 
me ; God brought somehow, and in some 
measure, into the terms of my comprehen- 
sion. 

Talk to me of abstract powers, of ab- 
stract holiness, of abstract love, and I will 
listen to you, but I cannot altogether un- 
derstand you. Perhaps you do not quite 
understand vourself. 

Show me Divine power actualized, show 
me Divine holiness personified, show me 
Divine love throbbing in a heart like mine, 
and all is real and lowered to the level of 
my little thought. I can cling to that. I 
feel myself lifted toward the Throne as I 
lay hold of that. 

Christ is so much to me because He 
brings God thus near me; He is Deity in 
humanity. He is God become Brother. 
Thus he shows me God. 

See, in but a single direction, how He 
shows to us the Divine love, and brings 



NEARNESS OF GOD IN CHRIST. 3 

that close to us. Go to the tops of the high- 
est mountains ; dive to the bottom of the 
deepest sea ; plunge down dark mines, to- 
ward the earth's center ; and you cannot 
find a spot where the atmosphere which 
surrounds us, and blesses us, and in which 
we live, has not gone before you. It is thus 
with the Divine love. Everything in life is 
wrapped with it and penetrated by it. I 
get certainty of this because Christ makes 
the Divine love real and near to me. See: 
the birth of every babe is made sacred by 
His own birth; the wedding joy is sancti- 
fied and sent on in stronger pulses by His 
presence ; childhood nestles beneath His 
benediction ; the least touch of want, but 
upon the utmost fringe of His garment, un- 
loosens the stream of loving help ; when 
the sisters bewail their brother, the eyes of 
Christ are dimmed with tears ; when the 
nails tear Him and the thorns wound Him, 
love finds excuse in ignorance, and Christ 
prays for his murderers — Father, forgive 
them, for they know not what they do. 
And the tragedy upon the Cross is but the 



4 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

truth of the Divine love written in the red 
and awful characters of a Divine sacrifice. 

Thus God's love I become aware of, sure 
of, in Christ. He is brother. He inter- 
prets it to me. He makes it real. He 
brings it close. 

Thus, as well in otner directions, I come 
to know God in Christ. Christ tells us who 
our God may be. Even my finiteness can 
lay hold of Christ. I am not left to vague 
and trying thought about the Infinite and 
Absolute— about Force and Law. I hear 
His words, " He that hath seen me hath 
seen the Father," and in that vision my soul 
is satisfied. 



CHRIST'S FEELING TOWARD US 

THE martyrdom of Stephen teaches us a 
most precious fact. I think the repre- 
sentation wonderfully beautiful and sug- 
gestive. There are the Sanhedrim, angry and 
violent with hate at Stephen for his brave, 
calm witnessing. The assembly is smitten 
with passion, as the tempest smites the 
sea to waves. There is no longer the sem- 
blance of decorum and self-control. They 
gnash at him with their teeth. 

And there is Stephen, as careless of all 
their raging as the stars are of the dash- 
ing of the ocean waves, His thoughts are 
elsewhere ; his gaze is elsewhere. He is 
caught with the shining of a great vision, 
Its brightness falls upon his face, and it 
looks, amid all the trouble and the crisis, as 
it had been an angel's face. The veil which 

5 



6 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

usually hides heaven from our dim human 
eyes, is drawn aside for him. He sees all 
the glory. It is given him to look upon the 
burning radiance of the throne of God. 
But he sees more than that. He sees that 
very Messiah, that very Son of Man, who 
lately had been crucified, in whose name 
and for whose sake he had been so cour- 
ageously witnessing in the presence of the 
angry Sanhedrim, " standing on the right 
hand of God." 

The attitude in which Stephen sees the 
Son of Man is most significant. In the other 
Scriptures, where the glorified Son of Man 
is spoken of, He is represented as sitting, 
rather than as standing, at God's right hand. 
(Col. 3, i ; Heb. i, 3.) But, amid these opened 
heavens into which Stephen looked, the 
Son of Man is standing, as though stirred 
with interest in behalf of Stephen; as though 
alert with sympathy for him; as though 
waiting to bid him welcome into his own 
presence. Standing — that is the attitude 
of interest in one, and activity for one. 

And, lest we should think that all 'this 



CHRIST S FEELIXG TOWARD US. 7 

was some wild figment of Stephen's brain — • 
lest we should be led to say, Oh, it is only 
a picture which his imagination painted, 
stirred into high daring by the excitement 
of the time — lest we should think it alto- 
gether subjective with Stephen — a dream, a 
thought, a phantasy, and clothed with no 
garments of objective realness, we are ex- 
pressly told that Stephen was " full of the 
Holy Ghost" as he looked up steadfastly 
into heaven. The Spirit of truth was in 
him, and therefore he said the truth. 

Now all this representation here is singu- 
larly beautiful and significant. It means, I 
am sure, what Chrysostom long ago said it 
meant, that the glorified Son of Man had 
risen from His throne to succor His perse- 
cuted servant and to receive him to Him- 
self. It means that at the very point of 
the stony crisis which was closing around 
the brave and faithful witnesser, though he 
was lonely from every human help, and the 
helpless center of the fiery scorn of all those 
raging Jews, there was one heart that beat 
for him, there was one hand stretched out to 



8 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

help him, and that the hand and heart of 
Him who upholds all things by the word of 
His power, whom if one have on his side he 
can well afford to be even in the minority 
of one, against the world. 

This then is the lesson which the scene 
teaches us — the alert interest of the Lord 
Jesus in us at every moment of our brave 
witnessing for Him; at every time of our 
steadfast standing; in every fierce fight with 
temptation; in every period of our loneli- 
ness. Others may desert us, be careless of 
us, be even angry and threatening toward 
us, think us only fit for stoning ; but He 
who upholds all things by the word of His 
power, knows us, notices us, is eager in his 
interest on our account. 

Such a revelation as this of the real and 
special and tender thought of us by the 
central Heart of the universe, is the dis- 
closure of the very thing which the heart of 
man deepest needs and most cryingly calls 
for. It is this which has been the strength 
of the noblest deeds the world has ever 
seen: of Polycarp in his flame; of Perpetua 



CHRIST S FEELING TOWARD US, 9 

welcoming the beasts which sprang to tear 
her; of William of Orange, standing against 
the hosts of Philip the Second; of Washing- 
ton at Valley Forge; of Garrison in his 
fight for freedom; of all true human help- 
fulness and reform which has lifted the 
world onward and made it wear a kindlier 
face; this — that somehow God was standing 
for one and on one's side, and would not 
Himself desert, though men might, when 
brave witnessing must be done for Him. 

It is only from the Bible and from the an- 
swering instincts of the human heart that 
you can get this revelation. You cannot get 
it from nature. That speaks to you only of 
law, and not love. The flames will burn Poly- 
carp as quickly as the worst felon. The 
beasts will tear the Christian Perpetua as 
ragingly as any heathen criminal. The stones 
will smite down Stephen, witnessing for his 
Lord, as relentlessly as they will any foul 
adulterer. Nature says Law. The revela- 
tion of the Lord Jesus Christ in the Scrip- 
ture says Love — an infinite heart, a helpful 
hand, an inner strength, making Stephen's 



io HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

stoning his coronation, opening a welcome 
for him when the stones have done their 
work. 

This is what we need, this is what we 
cannot get on without — this certainty that 
there is no cold carelessness of us there at 
the throne of God, but an alert interest for 
us and a loving sympathy. This is the re- 
source of a Christian witnessing and cour- 
age — that the Master cares, loves, regards, 
applauds. 



GRACE SUFFICIENT FOR US 

FAR away in the wilds of the great 
West, amid that tangle of tortuous 
ridge and valley which marks the Divide of 
the Continent, towers a mighty mountain. 
Whenever a Mexican sees that mountain, he 
removes his hat and gazes reverently. It is 
no wonder that he does. It is a sight deeply 
suggestive of religious feeling. For, far up 
on that mountain's flank where it meets the 
sky and where the clouds often come down 
to rest,there have been wrought, by wrench, 
of earthquake and prying of the frost and 
beating of the tempest, two great gulches, 
running athwart each other precisely as do 
the two portions of a cross. And, in the 
summer weather, w T hen the other snow from 
the mountain sides has melted somewhat, 
and has left behind itself the green of the 
trees and the solemn purple of the naked 
rocks — this snow, protected in these deep 

n 



1 2 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

cross-like gulches, remains through the 
summer's heat, shining still. And so you 
see, far up amid the sky and clouds, and set 
amid the green and purple of the trees and 
rocks, sculptured upon that mountain side, 
as if by the hand of God Himself, a vast, 
white, gleaming cross. Those who have 
seen it have told me there is no sight more 
grand, and beautiful, and subduing amid all 
the wonders of those mountain wilds. This 
is the name it carries, most appropriately— 
the Mountain of the Holy Cross. 

When men seek a path through those 
twisted valleys, and must master steep ridge 
after steep ridge, and must often turn upon 
their tracks to get on at all, and wind about, 
now toward this point of the compass, and 
now toward that — that by which they must 
travel and which shall prevent them from 
getting lost, is the great landmarks of the 
country — the mountains running in such 
trend and of such shape on either side. 
This mountain of the Holy Cross is such a 
landmark, most conspicuous. Many a poor 
bewildered pilgrim, catching sight of those 



GRA CE S UFFICIEN T FOR US. 1 3 

white arms stretched out on that mountain 
side, has recognized his whereabouts and 
pressed on with fresh courage and with cer- 
tain step toward his journey's end. He 
could not be lost now, for did it not stand 
right in his vision — that unmistakable 
Mountain of the Holy Cross. 

As you have gone on in life, and thought 
of the past behind you and the future you 
confront; of the twisted, winding ways of 
life through which you have already gone; 
of the deep valleys of disappointment into 
which you have been pushed ; of the steep 
ridges of difficulty up which you have been 
forced to climb; of the paths so often hin- 
dered by some mountain inaccessible, turn- 
ing upon themselves and seeming to lead 
backward instead of forward; as you have 
tried to look ahead and see what the future 
holds, and wondered what in the world 
would meet you there, where the mists drop 
down so thickly; as you have waited thus 
for a little, and thought of life, its ups and 
downs, its sins, its cares, its responsibilities, 
its mistakes — has it never seemed to you as 



14 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

though you were like a pilgrim lost amid 
the mountains, as though you were failing to 
recognize the landmarks, as though you 
knew hardly what to do or where to turn, 
and have you not prayed and looked and 
waited for some lifted and certain and satis- 
fying Mountain of a Holy Cross to guide 
you surely on your way ? Can you not im- 
agine how a traveler, lost amid those moun 
tains and going onward, he knows not exactly 
where, and turning some rocky corner and 
coming suddenly into sight -of that great 
white cross, and so, because it was there, 
finding his way here — can you not imagine 
how such a traveler would rest in the vision 
of that great cross and say to himself, 
" That is something certain; that cannot fail 
me; I know I shall get on rightly now !" 
How sufficient for him, the steady shining 
of that gleaming cross. Thinking of the 
past and future, there is for us a waymark 
for life as certain and as sufficient as is that 
mountain to the bewildered traveler. This 
is our Mountain of the Holy Cross, " My 
grace is sufficient for thee." We can rest in 



GRA CE S UFFICIEXT FOR US. 1 5 

that. We can guide our way by that. We 
..can get courage and hope from that. 

Get the right idea from the words, "And he 
said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee." 
As they are translated in our English ver- 
sion, they yield the thought that the Lord 
said it once to Paul and then stopped say- 
ing it — just as though the traveler in the 
mountains should get one glimpse of the 
Holy Cross and then never a glimpse again. 
But such is not the tender and delicate 
meaning of the Greek. It tells us not only 
that the Lord had said it at one particular 
time, but that He v/as now going on saying 
it. He has said it; He is saying it now; it 
is a constant saying for every hour and every 
day and every month and every year. It is 
the traveler going on his way beneath the 
safe and constant shadow of the Mountain of 
the Holy Cross. He sees it not once only; 
he may see it every time he lifts his eyes. 
What a grand, steady, satisfying, sufficient 
waymark it is for anybody who will turn 
his eyes to it, — this, that God keeps on say- 
ing to us, "My grace is sufficient for thee." 



CHRIST WITH US 

WE think of our Christ too much as 
we think of the dead heroes; as 
one who has lived, has wrought a mighty 
work, has left the world. We ought the 
rather constantly to think of Him not only 
as the one who has done something for us, 
but as he who is now doing; not only as the 
one who has lived, but as he who is now liv- 
ing; not only as the one who has been in 
the world, but as he who is now in it just as 
utterly as when the dust of Palestine fell 
upon his blessed feet. We ought to think 
of Him as a veritable, vital, vitalizing, per- 
sonal presence with us. 

Standing in the crypt of the Cathedral of 
St. Paul's in London, your eye is attracted 
by a huge mass of porphyry, to gain which 
they searched the continent of Europe. 

16 



CHRIST WITH US. 17 

They wanted something large, massive, 
grand. At length they came upon it in 
Cornwall, England. They cut it, shaped 
it, polished it, at last lifted it upon its plinth 
of Aberdeen granite, and dedicated it as the 
tomb of their grandest man. On one side 
you read the inscription, "Arthur, Duke of 
Wellington, born May 1, 1769; died Sep- 
tember 14, 1852. " A great man was buried 
when they buried him. His hand had been 
for many a year on the helm of the British 
Empire. His influence remains, indeed, but 
his personality has departed In these dif- 
ficult times, confronting England in the 
sense of personal presence she cannot have 
the Iron Duke. 

Pass beyond the Channel and in Paris 
take your place beneath the golden dome 
of the Hotel des Invalides, and behold the 
most magnificent sepulcher in the world. 
You are gazing now at the burial place of 
Wellington's chief antagonist. Above, the 
dome; beneath your feet, the variegated 
pavement; down in the open crypt, rimmed 
round with the marble balustrade, the sar- 



1 3 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

cophagus. Circled with wreaths of laurel, 
are written in mosaic the principal victories 
of the great hero. Ranged round are the 
tattered flags he bore, waving to triumph. 
Read that inscription — it is a sentence from 
the great Emperor's will written in his exile: 
" I desire that my ashes lie on the banks of 
the Seine, among the French people whom 
I have loved so well." But Napoleon him- 
self has gone. His influence remains, but 
he is not in the world. Him, neither, can 
France have in any way a personal presence. 
Go to Rome; stand for a moment under 
the encircling dome of the Pantheon. 
Raphael loved that majestic building, more 
majestic even than St. Peter's. It was his 
wish that he mignt be buried there. Look! 
There on the wall it is written, " Here is 
the tomb of Raphael." But Raphael is not 
there. You may gaze entranced upon his 
Transfiguration in the Vatican, you may be 
touched and softened as his wonderful 
Madonnas tell you the history of that vir- 
gin motherhood, with its pains, its mys- 
teries, its beatitudes. But Raphael was 



CHRIST WITH US. 19 

done with this world at thirty-seven. He 
puts color no more to canvas. Everywhere 
in Rome you may see something that he 
has done; nowhere can you see anything 
that he is doing. His works last: he has 
gone forever. 

The great heroes, painters, poets, teachers 
— they have been; but, as to this world, 
they are no longer. They have gone other- 
where. They have carried their presence 
with them. They are memories ; they are 
not presences. 

Is the Lord Christ like these ? Canon 
Liddon asks. Is he no more than the first 
of the shadows of the past, the first of 
memories, the first of biographies, the most 
perfect of human ideals? Is he only an 
ideal, after all? Does he reign only in vir- 
tue of a mighty tradition of human thought 
and feeling in his favor, which creates and 
supports his imaginary throne ? 

No, he is a present, personal, living Sav- 
iour. " Lo! I am with you alway, even to 
the end of the world," is not an idle — not an 
unfulfilled promise. He is not with us 



20 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

merely as a thought, but as a life. He 
gathers us up into His own being, He floods 
us with it. There is inspiration here cer- 
tainly for any duty, for any endurance. 
The faith, Christ with me, can make the 
poorest and the hardest life luminous, joy- 
ous, glorious. This is the faith that over- 
cometh the world. 



DEAD, BUT YET ALIVE. 

PAUL says to the Colossians, " For ye 
are dead, and your life is hid with 
Christ in God." 

John Howard is just entering St. Peters- 
burg. Years before he quietly began that 
course of philanthropy which has put a crown 
upon his name, and changed the prison- 
methods of the world. Just now his fame 
is getting widely blown about. He has 
finished a difficult tour of prison-inspec- 
tion in Sweden. He is approaching the 
capital of Russia. But his fame hinders 
him. It eats up his time. It blocks his 
path. Like a carrier-pigeon to its nest, 
he would fly straight and swiftly to his 
work. So he leaves his carriage in the 
neighborhood and enters the city privately. 
The Empress has marked him, though, and 
sends a message to invite him to the palace. 

21 



22 HIN TS FOR THE CHRTS TIA N LIFE. 

Here, men of the usual sort would say, 
was an opportunity. - Here was, certainly, 
a perfectly pardonable chance for public 
praise. Mounting the pedestal of the pal- 
ace — who would not see him ? Public 
praise and public fame are not unpleasant. 
Most men hunger for them. But John 
Howard is evidently a fanatic. His heart 
is set upon but one thing. He believes 
himself to have heard God's voice calling 
him to the duty he is doing. He cannot 
rid himself from the dominion of that duty. 
Howard looks at the invitation with " his 
cool, piercing, English eye." To be sure, 
the Empress may be won to a special in- 
terest in prisons. The fires of philanthro- 
phy may be kindled in the court itself. 
But, as things are now, the chances are 
against it. Tarrying in the palace will hin- 
der more than help. He cannot wait to ac- 
cept the invitation of the Empress; he 
passes the palace to plunge into the prisons. 

" But ye are dead." John Howard, living 
in his duty, is dead to every other sort of 
life — to intercourse with men, to applause, 



DEAD, BUT YET ALIVE. 23 

to the glitter of high society. He would 
rather be in prison, with duty, than in the 
palace, away from it. A very uncomforta- 
ble sort of life, you say. But you cannot 
help acknowledging it to be the truest and 
noblest sort in the light of conscience, in 
the light of God. 

This is the meaning of the Apostle to 
those Colossians. Thus are they dead, and 
yet alive. There is a lower fleshly life, 
rooted in pleasures, pomps, vanities — inun- 
cleanness, inordinate affection, evil concu- 
piscence, and covetousness which is idola- 
try ; in the which ye also walked some 
time, when ye lived in them. But ye are 
dead to such a life now, O, Colossian 
Christians ! You dwell in another realm — 
your life is hid with Christ in God. 

Think a moment of a life like this. 

It is a life in God. Here is a tree. It is 
rooted in the soil, and pumps up the juices 
by a million rootlets. It is bathed in the 
atmosphere, and the innumerable mouths 
of its innumerable leaves breathe it. It is 
immersed in the sunlight, and it gathers 



24 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

robustness out of that. It is wet with the 
rains and with the dews, and gains fresh- 
ness and vitality out of them. The life of 
the tree is in the soil, and air, and rain, and 
light, and dew. So this life in God is a life 
which subsists in Him. It gathers its vital- 
ity from Him. It is fed by forces which 
flow from Him. It is swayed by motives 
which stream from Him. Its source and 
sustenance is in God. 

It is a life with Christ in God. That it is 
in God, is possible because it is with Christ. 
Christ is the bond uniting God and man. 
Christ is at once Deity and Humanity — 
God and Brother. Christ comes to a man 
and carries up His life with him into God. 
That word translated "with," denotes the 
closest contact and companionship. 

It is a life hidden with Christ in God. 
That word " hidden," is but another touch 
of the Apostle's pencil to express the pro- 
found marriage and intimacy of the re- 
generate life with God. All real spiritual 
unions are hidden ones. A genuine friend- 
ship is the hiding of one heart in another. 



DEAD, BUT YET A LIVE. 25 

There are external friendships, where one 
heart touches another as stone touches 
stone, in merely outward contact, because 
society, or interest, or convenience, may 
demand it. Remove the external pressure, 
and the hearts roll apart as stones do. But 
when two drops of water touch each other, 
each hides itself in each. All this is but 
the faintest possible illustration of the 
meaning of this word "hid." A life hid 
with Christ, is a life so joined to Him as to 
be lost in Him. It is laid away in Him. It 
is protected, guarded, nourished in Him. It 
is itself a sharer in His being and bliss. 

This is the innermost meaning of becom- 
ing a Christian — we are dead, and yet alive. 
We are dead to the old and lower — we are 
alive to the new and higher. 

Such is a secure life, certainly. No harm 
can touch the withdrawn sanctuary in which 
its real existence finds its home. 

Such is a joyful life, certainly. To be 
thus alive with God and Christ, is to have 
chosen down to the deepest roots of being, 
the Supreme Right. There is no such sun- 



26 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

shine as the Right streams forth. It gilds 
poverties. It blesses sick-rooms. It illu- 
minates self-sacrifice. 

Such is a life which shall find a glorious 
revealing, certainly. There is more in it 
than we know. If a man had never seen a 
harvest, he could form no conception of its 
width and wealth from the seed. So it is 
with this life with Christ in God. It is a 
life hidden — a latent life — it is in its seed- 
form here. But the seed holds the harvest. 
Now are we the sons of God, but it doth 
not yet appear what we shall be. 



THE SECRET OF A TRUE LIFE. 

WE have, on the scientific or physical 
side of it, a very vague name for a 
very wonderful thing. That name is Force. 
By force, we mean that universal energy 
which, everywhere around us, is pushing up 
and out into such a various expression. We 
are apt to speak of dead matter. We 
hardly speak rightly thus. Matter is mov- 
ing, acting, incessantly. Matter is seized 
upon and arranged and molded by force ; 
by that great structural energy which is 
ever thrilling through the world and com- 
pelling matter into the differing shapes of 
rock, crystal, tree, flower, fruit. 

Were you to visit the Egyptian pyramids 
you would see vast and regular piles of 
mighty stones — stones so mighty, that the 
wonder for all time since has been, by what 

27 



28 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, 

almost omnipotent leverage such blocks 
were lifted and so exactly laid. 

But nature is a pyramid-builder. Here 
is a solution of common salt. Were you to 
examine it by a microscope, you could dis- 
cover nowhere floating through the water 
any of the salt particles. No microscope is 
piercing enough to define them. But let 
that solution stand a little while in the open 
air. The water which has been holding the 
salt disappears by evaporation. The salt 
remains. The inconceivably minute parti- 
cles begin to arrange themselves. In 
strange and regular order they lay them- 
selves down. In what order ? Almost pre- 
cisely according to the architecture of the 
old Egyptian pyramids. As Mr. Huxley 
says, " We have little pyramids built by 
salt, terrace above terrace, from base to 
apex ; forming thus a series of steps resem- 
bling those up which the Egyptian traveler 
is dragged by his guides." 

Now, neither the great stone piles nor 
the exquisite and microscopic piles of salt 
were built by chance. Any sane mind re- 



THE SECRET OE A TRUE LITE, 29 

jects at once such an explanation. In neither 
case did it happen so. The Eastern pyra- 
mids were reared by the toiling hands of 
multitudinous Egyptian slaves. The salt- 
atoms came together according to the law 
of crystallization. And, pushing backward 
amid the dim realm of causes, we do not 
think it unscientific to say that it is God 
who has given over these salt-atoms into 
the dominion of the force of crystalliza- 
tion. 

There must be somehow the inward force 
to shape the beautiful external thing. 

Now this principle is true for life. The 
desires, the purposes, the emotions, the ac- 
tions which go to make up life do not tum- 
ble into any crystalline clearness or beauti- 
ful exactitude. 

Dr. Arnold of Rugby gives in one of his 
letters an account of a saintly sister. For 
twenty years, through some disease, she 
was confined to a kind of crib ; never once 
could she change her posture for all that 
time. " And yet," says Dr. Arnold, and I 
think his words are very beautiful, " I never 



30 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

saw a more perfect instance of the spirit of 
power and love and of a sound mind. In- 
tense love, almost to the annihilation of 
selfishness ; a daily martyrdom for twenty 
years, during which she adhered to her 
early-formed resolution of never talking 
about herself ; thoughtful about the very 
pins and ribbons of my wife's dress, about 
the making of a doll's cap for a child ; but 
of herself — save as regarded her improving 
in all goodness — wholly thoughtless ; enjoy- 
ing everything lovely, graceful, beautiful, 
high-minded, whether in God's works or 
man's, with the keenest relish ; inheriting 
the earth to the very fullness of the promise ; 
and preserved through the very valley of 
the shadow of death from all fear or im- 
patience, or from every cloud of impaired 
reason which might mar the beauty of 
Christ's Spirit's glorious work. May God 
grant that I might come but within one 
hundred degrees of her place in glory. " 

Certainly such a life was true and beauti- 
ful. But the radiance of such a life never 
cheered this world by chance. A sunny 



THE SECRET OE A TRUE LIFE. 31 

patience, a bright-hearted self-forgetfulness, 
a sweet and winning interest in the little 
things of family intercourse, the divine lus- 
tre of a Christian peace, are not fortuitous 
weeds carelessly flowering out of the life 
garden. 

It is the internal which makes the exter- 
nal. It is the force residing in the atoms 
which shapes the pyramid. It is the beauti- 
ful soul within which forms the crystal of 
the beautiful life without. There are ex- 
quisite shells within the sea — the shell 
of the nautilus, many-chambered, softly 
curved, pearl-adorned, glowing with im- 
prisoned rainbows. There are ugly shells 
within the sea — rude, dirt-colored, unsight- 
ly clam-shells. But the shells are as the 
fishes within. To them is given the power 
of extracting out of the same sea the beauty 
and the grace, or the dullness and the rude- 
ness. 

So life will ever be what we make it — 
nautilus-shell or clam-shell. If we would 
have our life true and beautiful, then we 



32 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

must be true and beautiful. There is no 
other secret. 

How can we be thus ? There is a Scrip- 
ture which answers the question : Behold 
I stand at the door and knock. If any man 
will hear my voice and open the door, I will 
come in to him and sup with him, and he 
with me. 

If we want our hearts the residence of 
Christ, we must become Christly. But we 
must make them His residence. We cannot 
happen into Christlikeness. 



THE MOTIVE OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

MOTIVE— that this is the transcend- 
ent matter. 

Motive — that which impels to action 
and so stamps with its own color the black 
or white of the eventuating deed. 

" Give me a great thought that I may 
live upon it," cried the German poet, some- 
thing large enough, stirring enough, noble 
enough to push on and preside over my 
life. 

I waited one sweet summer afternoon in 
the secret cabinet of the First Napoleon, 
in the country palace of Fontainebleau. 
There were the cases filled with books with 
which to feed that mighty mind. Here 
was the great, wide table on which were 
spread the maps over w T hich he made those 
marvelous military calculations and com- 
binations, seizing minutes when his laggard 
foes thought hours nothing. 

33 



34 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

Now look around that window in the 
niche of which he used to sit and ply and 
weave his world-including thoughts, and 
see the motive which urged him on. Read 
those great gold letters set around its case- 
ment: Lodi, Areola, the Pyramids, Maren- 
go, Austerlitz — plainly the too-frequent 
French motive, glory — that he might add 
other shining names of prowess to the al- 
ready long and shining list. 

The apostate Julian objected to Augus- 
tine, " It is sin, then, when a heathen clothes 
the naked and binds up the wounds of the 
infirm." 

And Augustine answers that the act in 
itself, the matter of the act, is not sin, but 
as it does not proceed from faith and the 
purpose to honor God, the form of the act, 
the seminal principal of it which contains 
the morality of it, is sin. And you cannot 
help feeling that Augustine, after all, was 
right. A bad motive, dressed up in gar- 
ments of goodness, does not, because of 
its dress, get itself changed into goodness. 
If I am honest, simply because honesty 



MOTIVE FOR CHRIST! AX LIFE. 35 

is the best policy, I am not therefore right- 
ly honest as to motive, though I may be as 
to act. Upon that principle, if I should 
ever find that dishonesty is the best policy, 
for the reason that I was honest in the first 
case I would be dishonest in the second. 
An honest deed cannot regenerate a dis- 
honest motive. And in the last analysis 
and always, motive dominates action. 

" As a man thinketh in his heart so is 
he." It is the man in the deepest springs 
of his being and not at his finger-tips who 
is the real man. 

In the divine government a man is dis- 
criminated by motives. That which sets 
a man in motion, which appeals to his sen- 
sibilities, stimulates his desires, compels 
his w r ill, and so at last presses out into the 
flower and fruit of action — it is that by 
which a man is finally adjudicated. The 
question of motive is the great question. 

For the Christian the undermost and 
overmastering motive is Christ. A Chris- 
tian is a man Christed. Novalis extols 
Spinoza as a God-intoxicated man. Spi- 



36 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

noza's God was the God of the pantheist — 
an Impersonal Substance constituting the 
universe, an Absolute Infinite, a Universe- 
Ego, a Plenary Void, a Subject-Object 
identified — whatever these may mean. But 
the Christian is to be, to put the strong 
German of Novalis into our less pliable 
English speech, a Christ-intoxicated man. 
He is one whose whole being is to be per- 
vaded and presided over by the person 
Christ. The first thought, and the last 
thought, and the thought intermediate is to 
be Christ. The innermost motive of his 
life is Christ. 

It is no other place than this which the 
Lord claims. He that loveth father and 
mother more than Me is not worthy of Me, 
and he that loveth son or daughter more 
than Me is not worthy of Me, and he that 
taketh not his cross and followeth after Me 
is not worthy of Me. 

It is no other place than this which Paul 
yields the Lord Jesus when he exclaims, 
" For me to live is Christ. " 



A SOUL ON THE WAY TOWARD LIGHT. 

I HAVE often thought the Ethiopian, 
eunuch an admirable illustration of 
such a soul. Look at him for a moment. 
He had been a heathen; he had become a 
worshiper of Jehovah. He had been to 
Jerusalem to do service at the temple; on 
his way home he is reading the Scripture; 
he is poring over the prophecy of Isaiah; 
he is thinking within himself, . Of whom 
speaketh the prophet ? is it of himself or 
of some other ? 

While he is riding on, Philip accosts him, 
Understandest thou what thou readest ? He 
asks Philip to a seat beside him. He listens 
to his explanations. 

Then, under the touch of Philip's inter- 
pretation, the dim Scripture begins to glow 
before him, and the distinct vision of the 
Crucified begins to gather shape. That 

57 



38 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

feeds and fills the hunger of his soul — the 
beholding of the Lamb of God. He sees, 
he recognizes, he takes hold by faith. He 
is in the clear light now who had been in 
the mists. Even the day-spring from on 
high has risen on his soul. Then there 
follows the profession of his faith in bap- 
tism. 

I rode one morning several miles before 
the day had broken. Not yet had the sway 
of the night been in anywise disturbed. It 
was dark ; it was cold ; the way was dim. 
Ridges of fog had settled down, obscuring 
the road, wrapping the houses round, fling- 
ing their pall upon the trees. The world 
was waiting for a new day. Then there 
was painted upon the eastern sky the first 
dawn-streaks of the morning. Soon the 
sun himself appeared. The darkness folded 
its curtains. The fog banks were pierced 
and scattered by the slanting javelins of the 
sunbeams. The world could see. The sun 
was king. 

Thus it was, spiritually, with this servant 
of Candace. Now at last day shone upon 



ON THE WA Y TO WARD LIGHT. 39 

his soul. All was brimming with fresh 
light. He went on his way rejoicing. 

Notice why all this spiritual brightness 
came to him. It was not because he had 
gone to Jerusalem to worship ; he might 
have done that because it was respectable. 
Heathen religions at that time were flicker- 
ing out. It was a very common and repu- 
table thing to become a Jewish proselyte. 
It was not because he was studying the 
Scriptures; he might have done that as a 
mere literary exercise, because Isaiah was 
a wonderful poet ; or to carp and criticise. 
It was not because he so cordially wel- 
comed Philip ; he might have done this 
from courtesy. It was not because he lis- 
tened attentively to Philip's preaching ; he 
might have dome this to be polite. It was 
not because of any one of these reasons, or 
because of them all together, that he found 
the glorious light. 

Pascal says, " The perception of truth is 
a moral act." Then again, Pascal says, 
" The heart has reasons of which the un- 
derstanding knows nothing." The German 



40 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

Fichte says, " Our system of thought is 
often but the history of our heart." "If 
then/' he says again, " the will be stead- 
fastly and sincerely fixed upon what is 
good, the understanding will, of itself, dis- 
cover what is true." And then again, an- 
other writer says, " Belief in God is not a 
science, but a virtue." And with all this 
agrees the Scripture, With the heart man 
believeth unto righteousness. And all this 
is to say, that the undermost and necessary 
qualification toward getting on into religious 
light is moral disposition. This servant of 
Queen Candace shows, in all his action, 
that his deepest feeling was, God has the 
highest and most majestic claims upon me, 
and just as soon and as fast as those claims 
are made known to me I will submit to 
them. The man's heart was toward the 
sunrise, therefore he found the sunrise. The 
man's soul was a sincere soul, sincerely 
seeking moral light. Thus everything was 
a help to him; worship in the temple was a 
help to him ; the study of the Scriptures was 
a help to him ; the preaching of Philip was 



<9A r THE WAY TOWARD LIGHT. 41 

a help to him; baptism was a help to him. 
Beneath all these things there was a soul 
earnestly longing for the light, and so 
through all these things the light streamed 
in. 

That soul is on the certain path toward 
light which, sincerely desiring the light, 
constantly submits to the claims of the 
light as they are made known. That soul 
cannot stay in darkness any more than a 
flower, opening its petals broadly to the 
sun, can stay in shadow. 



THE JOYFULNESS OF THE CHRISTIAN 
LIFE. 

IT is comparatively easy to be ascetic. 
It is at once nobler and harder to be 
Christian. 

He was a Nazarite. No razor was to 
touch his hair. No wine was to pass his 
lips. He withdrew himself from common 
life. He dwelt in the wilderness. He de- 
nied himself. He was separate, simple, 
austere. He wore but a rough girdle of 
camel's hair. He ate but locusts and wild 
honey. He would put beneath his feet 
every usual, human joy, that, standing on 
it, he might be lifted into a closer contact 
with the Divine. He married no wife. He 
entered into no festivity. And his preach- 
ing was like his life— stern, denunciatory- 
woe, vengeance— the fan in the hand of 
judgment, and the earth beaten and purged 

42 



JOYFULNESS OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 43 

like a threshing floor. That sad and som- 
bre man standing there amid the gloomy 
shadows of the rocks — he had been the best 
type, in his time, of one thoroughly re- 
ligious. Afterward Jesus said of him, This 
is Elias which was to come; among them 
that are born of women there hath not risen 
a greater than John the Baptist. 

Yet it is most remarkable and noteworthy 
that when the baptism had been received, 
and the temptation endured, and the min- 
istry entered on, almost the first official act 
of it is to lead the disciples — not into a wil- 
derness after the manner of John the Bap- 
tist, but to a marriage feast. 

This was the most joyful feast a Jew 
could know. Everything bright in Orien- 
tal customs gathered and culminated there. 
The bridegroom wore a festive dress. On 
his head was a nuptial crown. He was 
redolent of myrrh, frankincense — all rare 
perfumes. The bride was wrapped in white 
garments, most costly, flashing with gold 
thread and spangled with jewels. Then 
there was the flaming torchlight procession 



44 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, 

through the streets. Then, when at last 
bride and bridegroom met, for seven, and 
sometimes for fourteen days, were the fes- 
tivities protracted. There were games; 
there was laughter; mirth was king. 

It was a feast like this to which the 
Saviour came. He and His disciples were 
of the joyful company. He leaves John the 
Baptist in the wilderness and gives the 
sanctity of His presence to such a scene. 
It means something for us. Every act of 
Christ has meaning for us. A religion 
which cannot take in the significance of 
this glory is one-sided, and so far false. 
Think, too, how long the world had been 
waiting for this ministry — through what 
thousand years of darkness, crime, and dim 
heathen gropings. Remember, too, that 
thirty years had passed since the Advent 
had been announced. Think also of the 
hungry need for His healing, preaching, 
redeeming, just then in Palestine; what 
crowds of sick, what throngs of the heavy- 
laden, what multitudes vainly turning, like 
one in fever, now here, now there, for peace 



JOYFULNESS OF CHRISTIAN LIFE. 45 

of mind. It would seem as though now, 
any way, when the ministry was at last be- 
gun, joyful weddings could get on without 
the Master, and the healing power flow 
forth in constant stream, and the words of 
balm be incessantly pressed upon the sin- 
wounds of the heart; that for Him at least 
there could be no time for such worldliness. 
But the Lord Jesus did tarry at this wed- 
ding feast. There the fact stands; the en- 
trance into the Lord's ministry was by the 
way of such social joys. The first miracle 
was wrought that these joys might go on 
unhindered. 

Well, I can get no other lesson from it all 
than this: that Christianity is not asceticism. 
Joyfulness, too, is righteousness. Recrea- 
tion, in its time and place, is just as reli- 
gious as prayer and preaching in its time 
and place. To be Christian is not to be 
like John the Baptist in the wilderness. 
You say Christianity is hard, and narrow, 
and repressive, and blighting tow r ard the 
fragrant flowers of our delights. I behold 
my Master at this wedding feast, and say, 



46 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

Not so. Everything rightly joyful in this 
wide world belongs to the Christian. The 
glory manifested here is the glory of the 
sanctity of all legitimate human joys. 

It. is a great deal easier to be like John 
the Baptist than like Christ. But to be like 
Christ is the end and aim of Christian 
living. We are not to separate ourselves 
from life; we are to consecrate life for 
Jesus' sake. I think these true and noble 
words, "To shroud ourselves in no false 
mist of holiness; to dare to show ourselves 
as we are, making no solemn affectation of 
reserve or difference from others ; to be 
found at the marriage feast; to accept the 
invitation of the rich Pharisee, Simon, and 
the scorned publican, Zacheus; to mix with 
the crowd of men, and yet amidst it all to 
remain a consecrated spirit — a being set 
apart — not of this world, alone in the heart's 
deeps with God; to put the cup of this 
world's gladness to the lips and yet be un- 
intoxicated; to gaze steadily on all its 
grandeur and yet be undazzled; plain and 
simple in personal desires; to feel the 



JOYFULNESS OF CHRISTIAN LIFE, 47 

world's brightness and yet deny its thrall 
— this is the difficult and rare and glorious 
life of God in the soul of man." 

May God give us this grace of the world's 
use, and save us from the disaster of the 
world's abuse. 



TRIBULATION. 

THERE is a latent poetry in this word, 
which, besides being very beautiful, 
will assist us to discover the design and use 
of tribulation. 

It is an Oriental harvest time. There is 
the threshing floor. It is hard and smooth 
and broad — formed of the living rock or of 
earth closely trodden together. Here come 
the reapers bending beneath their loads of 
gathered grain. They cast the grain down 
upon that threshing floor. And here comes 
the tribulum — that is the threshing instru- 
ment. It is a heavy wooden platform. On 
the under side it is studded thick with bits 
of broken flint or with savage iron teeth. 
Oxen are yoked to it. See ! they drag it 
back and forth over the prostrate grain. 
Now look — all the wheat sheaves are sadly 
bruised and split. The wheat itself is 

48 



TRIBULATION. - 49 

broken out from the enfolding and useless 
straw. Everywhere on the threshing floor 
you can see multitudes of the clean kernels. 
Now they push aside the straw. Now with 
fans they blow the chaff away. There lie 
the wheat kernels— the real thing they have 
been after through all the sowing and the 
reaping and the threshing, fit now to be 
ground and manfactured into bread for 
human use. But they could not have got- 
ten the wheat had it not been for the tribu- 
lum. 

Tribulation takes its name and meaning 
from that instrument — -the tribulum. Tribu- 
lation is the Divine threshing of a man. 
And Christ tells us that in this world we 
must have it. The world is a threshing- 
floor, and on every threshing-floor there is 
tribulation. Blows of pain must break off 
the evil husks hindering what is good and 
noble in us. The useless straw must be 
beaten away from the golden kernel. 

Now no chastisement, for the present, 
seemeth to be joyous, but grievous, says 
the Scripture. Threshing is never pleasant. 



50 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, 

Nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peace- 
able fruits of righteousness to them that 
are exercised thereby — The true and valu- 
able grain appears. 



THE TRUE TREATMENT OF CHASTISE- 
MENT. 

THE twelfth chapter of Hebrews is very 
specific in direction here. 
We are not to despise chastisement. My 
son, despise not thou the chastening of the 
Lord. That is to say, we are not to cherish 
any hardened defiance of suffering spring- 
ing from a stiff seli'-will or a proud reluctance 
to confess that we need chastisement. We 
are not to have, under chastisement, any 
contumacious spirit. We are not to kick 
against God's will. We are not in a hard 
way to stand out against it. Christianity 
is never stoicism; it is loving submission. 
One said to me once, in effect, " It was 
wrong and cruel for God to take away my 
son. I will not be reconciled to it. It was 
very ugly, unnecessary harshness." That 
was meeting chastisement with a stony 

5i 



52 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, 

heart ; refusing to learn its lessons ; des- 
pising it. We may not carry ourselves thus 
under our chastisement. Matthew Henry 
says, " We must take heed of being made 
cross by cross providences." 

We are not to faint under divine chas- 
tisement — Nor faint when thou art re- 
buked of me. Some people, when trouble 
comes, just despond and give up.. They 
become like tangles of helpless sea-weed 
dashed by the waves against the shore. 
There was an old Israelitish king, Jehoram 
by name, who, surrounded by all sorts of 
difficulty, cried out, " Behold this evil is of 
the Lord ; what should I wait for the Lord 
any longer ?" That was fainting under 
chastisement — thinking that God did not 
care, that prayer was useless. There was a 
great prophet once who had been immense- 
ly brave and had done for the Lord most 
valiant service ; but obstacles hindered him, 
and all of a sudden he ran away and tired 
himself utterly out by a long flight into the 
wilderness, and sank down under a juniper 
tree and wailed weakly forth, It is enough; 



TREATMENT OF CHASTISEMENT. 53 

now, O Lord, take away my life. That was 
fainting under divine chastisement. How 
good God is, not to answer our fainting, 
despairing prayers! Elijah did not die. God 
swept him upward at the last in a chariot 
of fire, he not tasting death. 

We are to be sure that every chastisement 
is right and wise. God makes no mistake 
in the measure or the kind of pain he sends 
us. For our earthly parents " Verily for a 
few days chastened us after their own 
pleasure ;" that is, as seemed good to them; 
"but He for our profit, that we may be par- 
takers of His holiness." 

Some one lays down these five admirable 
rules for reproving children : " First, re- 
prove without anger ; passion destroys the 
moral power of rebuke. Second, reprove 
with consideration; take the best view of 
the case, not the worst. Third, let your 
reproof be directed to the reason and the 
conscience; thereby you educate the child. 
Fourth, reprove gently ; Thy gentleness 
hath made me great. Fifth, do not always 
reprove; molasses catches more flies than 



54 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

vinegar. Fathers, provoke not your chil- 
dren to anger, least they be discouraged." 
Admirable rules certainly — but then, who 
keeps them ? In this difficult work of rear- 
ing children, what bunglers we are ! We 
chasten them as it seems good to us, and 
how constantly do we fall into sad mistakes ! 
But God, in his chastisement of us, we are 
to be sure makes no mistake. " Should we 
not much rather be in subjection unto the 
Father of spirits, and live ?" Infinite wis- 
dom, infinite love, infinite tenderness, ap- 
point the pain. It is best, wisest, most 
right. 

We are to be sure that some grand de- 
sign of beatitude is coming out of our chas- 
tisement. Now no chastening for the pres- 
ent seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: 
nevertheless, afterward, it yieldeth the 
peaceable fruits of righteousness to them 
that are exercised thereby. 

Wherefore, lift up the hands that hang 
down, and the feeble knees. 



DIVINE AND HUMAN ENERGY. 

DR. LYMAN BEECHER tells us that 
when he was pastor at East Hamp- 
ton, Long Island, old Deacon Miller, a holy 
man, sent for him one day. The deacon was 
housed with sickness. " I am glad to see 
you," said he ; " I know how you feel ; you 
must not be discouraged ; I lie on my bed 
and pray for you. I have been praying for 
all the village. I begin at one end, and go 
into the next house, and then into the next, 
until I have gone round ; and then I have 
not prayed enough, so I begin and go round 
again." What wonder that Dr. Beecher 
adds, " I went home expecting." 

There is a spiritual power which is sub- 
lime in its holy daring ; which mounts up- 
ward, and lays hold of the Throne of God ; 
which, with a reverent resolution, allies it- 
self with the Divine arm. Along the chan- 
nel of such spiritual power the Divine en- 
ergy flows and the truth overcomes. 



56 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

Now it is a principle we are never to lose 
sight of, that in this world the Divine en- 
ergy cooperates with the human energy. 
God had stored force in steam from the be- 
ginning. Steam could drive an engine just 
as well five hundred years ago as now. But 
before the force of steam could be har- 
nessed into use for man, James Watt must 
notice it lifting the cover of his mother's 
teakettle, and generalizing from that be- 
ginning, must build his engine which steam 
could move. God had stored heat in the 
anthracite coal seaming our mountains 
from the beginning ; but God kindled no 
fire with it that man might see it burn. 
Man called it black stone and thought it 
incombustible as granite, until at last, by 
what we call accident, he learned how to 
apply to it the proper draught, and its heat 
was disengaged. God had given electricity 
the power of swift flight from the begin- 
ning ; but God arranged no batteries ; God 
strung no telegraph wires ; man must do 
that ; doing that, the speed which God had 
given electricity enabled man to talk to 
man, though each stood at antipodes. 



DIVINE AJSFD HUMAN ENERGY. 57 

Thus God waits upon man ; working 
through him, as it were ; holding back his 
power until men actualize and apply it. 
And what is true everywhere else, is true 
also in religion. When shall God's king- 
dom come ? When we, allying ourselves 
with God by self-surrendering prayer, ask 
that it may come. Jesus saw the multi- 
tudes ; He was moved with compassion for 
them. They fainted ; they lay down 
wearied, like sheep overdriven ; they were 
scattered abroad like sheep unshepherded. 
Jesus saw it all, was moved by it all, was 
stirred with pity because of all. Then 
saith he unto his disciples, The harvest 
truly is plenteous, but the laborers are few. 
What then ? Will he at once commission 
and dispatch the laborers by his own im- 
mediate and unconditioned power ? Not 
so. He turns to his disciples ; He calls 
upon them to summon their spiritual en- 
ergy for the crisis ; He adjures them to lay 
hold upon God for His help because of 
that unreaped harvest, that so, through the 
use of the power in their hands, the help 



58 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

might come. " Pray ye, therefore/' says 
Jesus, " the Lord of the harvest, that He 
will send forth laborers into His harvest. ,, 
As though He had said, " Except you use 
your spiritual power — except you mount 
upward towards God in the energy of 
prayer, the harvest must stay unreaped." 
God uses man. God cooperates with man. 

Just here a difficulty arises: " I don't feel 
as I ought ; I am not interested as I should 
be," you say. "I lack the spiritual virility; 
I am not conscious as I should be, of special 
energy in the use of prayer. Since God 
thus waits somehow upon me, how can I 
cast away this chill and death and weak- 
ness ?" 

You remember that fearful night in 
Egypt. You remember the blood upon the 
doorposts. All who were behind those 
reddened doorposts were safe utterly. 

But that was not all. There was a jour- 
ney before the Israelites. They needed the 
strength for it. That lamb whence the 
blood flowed they were to take and roast 
with fire ; then, gathering together, every 



DIVINE AND HUMAN ENERGY, 59 

one of them was to eat of it. Do you not 
see the symbolism ? The figure is strong, 
but real. They were saved by the blood 
of the lamb. They were furnished with 
power by eating the lamb. You have 
trusted in the blood of Christ, the Lamb 
of God, and so are saved ; but your Pass- 
over has been too much a partial one. 
You are the weak, doubting, powerless 
Christian that you are, because you have 
not— let me use the strong figure of the 
Scripture — eaten of the Lamb of God. 
You have trusted in Christ's blood for the 
pardon of past sins, and that is well ; but 
you have not received spiritual refresh- 
ment and entered into spiritual mastery, 
because you have not kept yourself in con- 
stant communion with Christ — using again 
the strong figure which Christ, himself has 
sanctioned — eating His flesh and drinking 
His blood. And that is ill. We gain vigor 
for the Christian battle by a constant spir- 
itual appropriation of the Divine energy 
garnered up in Christ. 



THE SHUT BOOR. 

THE symbol of a strong life is the Shut 
Door. When thou hast shut thy 
door, pray to thy Father which is in secret, 
says the Master. 

There are a good many things which that 
closed door ought to shut out. There are 
some things it ought to shut in. 

That closed door ought to shut out the 
Outward. 

We are each of us single souls moving on 
toward God. The life we live in God is a 
separate, personal life. It must grow from 
its own root and not another's. We must 
have our daily soul-work between our own 
souls and God. We must read our own 
Bibles. We must do our own praying. We 
must enter into our own believing. We 
must grow ourselves* each one of us, singly, 
into the grace and knowledge of God. 

60 



THE SHUT DOOR, 61 

Each separate Christian life must strike its 
root back into a separate and singular com- 
munion with God. By the closed closet 
door shut out then, for a little time, the 
Outward. 

The Outward of daily toil. You have no 
right to be so busy that you cannot pray. 

The Outward of even Christian work. 
You may not let what you do for Christ 
take the place of secret and innermost com- 
munion with him. 

The Outward of Public Worship. You 
may not quiet your conscience about your 
neglect of secret prayer by a multitudinous 
running to public prayer. 

The Outward of Family Worship. There 
are some who make the reading of a chap- 
ter and a general prayer with the family a 
foil by which they ward off from themselves 
the duty of intimate and self-scrutinizing 
intercourse with God. 

Robert Cecil used to say, " I feel that all 
I know, and all I teach will do nothing for 
my soul, if I spend my time as some people 
do, in business or company. My soul starves 



62 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, 

to death in the best company; and God is 
often lost in prayers and ordinances. Enter 
into thy closet, said Christ, and shut thy 
door. Shut thy door means much. It 
means shut out not only nonsense but busi- 
ness; not only the company abroad, but the 
company at home. It means let thy poor 
soul have a little rest and refreshment, and 
God have opportunity to speak to thee in a 
still small voice — or He will speak to thee 
in thunder. ,, 

Shut out the Outward. Be alone with 
God. 

That closed door is to shut out conscious 
sinning. 

What is real prayer ? It is the deliberate 
choice of God and of the things of God. 
But now if a man come into God's presence 
cherishing known sin, holding to it, refusing 
to yield it, he chooses sin instead of God. 
His prayer, then, is invalidated. He may 
have used the form of prayer, but he has 
not prayed. His heart prefers other than 
that the lips declare. If he would really 
pray, he must shut conscious, wilful sinning 
outside the closet door. 



THE SHUT DOOR.. 63 

A Spanish artist was employed to paint 
the Last Supper. It was his aim to throw 
all the sublimity of his art into the figure 
and face of Christ. But he painted on the 
table, just in the foreground, some silver 
cups, exquisitely chased. When his friends 
came to see the picture in the easel, every- 
one said, "What beautiful cups." But it 
was Christ the artist chiefly meant to paint, 
not silver cups. He seized his brush and 
dashed them from the canvas. 

Would you know what sin you must leave 
outside your shut closet door? Anything, 
everything, however beautiful, however 
pleasurable, which comes between your soul 
and Christ; everything which clouds the 
vision of that Face. Whatever separates 
between your soul and Christ is sin, at least 
to you. The door of the closet must be 
shut on it. 

That closed door ought to shutout Indo- 
lence. " Believe me," said Samuel Taylor 
Coleridge, " to pray with all your heart and 
strength; with the reason and the will; to 
believe vividly that God will listen to your 



64 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

voice through Christ, and verily do the thing 
He pleaseth thereupon — that is the last, the 
greatest achievement of the Christian war- 
fare on earth." And Coleridge agrees with 
Scripture. What we read of as the "ef- 
fectual fervent prayer" ought to be rendered 
the energetic working prayer. We must 
pray as though prayer were real; only thus 
can it be real. 

That closed door ought to shut out 
Hurry. It is the patient, silent quiet of the 
closet that we need. I think these great 
words of James Martineau, " There it is — in 
such patient silence — that we accumulate 
the inward power which we distribute and 
spend in action; that the soul acquires a 
greater and more vigorous being, and gath- 
ers up its collective forces to bear down upon 
the piecemeal difficulties of life and scatter 
them to dust; there alone can we enter 
into that spirit of self-abandonment by 
which we take up the cross of duty, how- 
ever heavy, with feet however worn and 
bleeding." To such high and invigorating 
silence, Hurry is quick death. Often we 



THE SHUT DOOR,- 65 

must leave Hurry outside that closed closet 
door. 

But what is that closed closet door to 
shut in ? God — God and our own souls. 
Robert Burns lamented that he could not 
"pour out his inmost soul, without reserve, 
to any human being, without danger of one 
day repenting his confidence." But there 
is a secret oracle where the soul may utter- 
ly tell forth itself. " Shut thy door" on your- 
self and God. Tell him of your besetting 
sins, temptations, troubles, infelicities, per- 
plexities, the greatest, the least; let Him 
speak to you, breathe upon you, quiet you, 
strengthen you. 

And though none but God and your own 
soul shall know what goes on inside that 
shut door, all shall know that something 
mighty and beneficent has gone on inside 
of it; you shall come forth so calm, so shin- 
ing, and so strong. 

The symbol of a strong life is the Shut 
Door. 



APPROPRIATION OF GOD. 

THE story of the discovery of gold in 
California is very interesting. There 
had been a kind of glowworm glimmer of 
gold about the country for many years. 
Spanish explorers had scented gold; but, 
somehow, only a little of it had been dis- 
covered, and the few people scattered thinly 
over the great State were altogether igno- 
rant of the surprising treasure mingled 
with the sands on which they trod. They 
were poor people, yet with wealth right at 
their hand. They were poor, not because 
there was not wealth around them, but just 
because they had not made it their own — 
appropriated it. 

But one day in the year 1847 some men 
were at work at Sutter's Mill on the Ameri- 
can Fork of the Sacramento River. They 
were repairing the race-way of the saw mill. 
A little child, poking among the stones ly- 
ing in the channel of the race-way, the 
waters of which had been turned aside that 

66 



AP PROPRIA TION OF, GOD. 67 

it might be mended, picked up a lump of 
gold and showed it to her father for a pretty 
stone. That bit of gold was the key to the 
immense mineral wealth of the great State. 
Then the people who had been poor, grew 
rich through appropriating the wealth 
which had been around them all the time. 
Everywhere they began to find the gold. 
More of it in this race-way; in the Sacra- 
mento River ; in all of its tributaries; 
sprinkled upon the hill sides, in the gullies 
scooped out by the fierce winter rains ; 
everywhere. Then the multitudes started 
thitherward from all the world. California 
sprang, almost at once, from a nearly un- 
known and unsettled country, into a 
mighty State. 

Now what was true of these early settlers 
of California on the side of worldly wealth, 
is true of most of us on the side of spiritual 
wealth. 

With millions just at their hands, they 
were poor, through lack of appropriation. 
Most of us are poor spiritually, yet with all 
the treasure in the bosom of the Infinite 



68 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

lying within the grasp of the soul; and we 
are poor, for the same reason — lack of ap- 
propriation. 

We are not what we might be. Even the 
stateliest Christian is not, but the greater 
number of us are very far from being stately 
Christians. We are stricken spiritually. 
There is no large, constant and joyful in- 
come of religion. Few of us have enough 
to pay squarely and at once the daily debts 
of the daily duties, annoyances, trials, har- 
assments of daily life. We are weak, and 
overcome of temptation, and impatient, and 
fretful, and complaining, and unloving, and 
harsh in judgment, and mean, and unchari- 
table, and only now and then a very little 
Christian. And yet right at the hand of 
the soul, there is a spiritual wealth as large 
and rich as the heart of God. We ought 
not to be content with such spiritual pov- 
erty. When Paul said he had learned in 
whatsoever state he was therewith to be 
content, he did not mean contentment with 
any such spiritual pauperism as curses the 
most people. We ought to be stirred with 



AP PROPRIA TION OF GOD. 69 

discontent toward spiritual attainment, as 
thorough and abiding as seized those Cali- 
fornia settlers toward their past poverty 
when they came to know they might have 
the gold lying on all the hills simply for the 
picking up. 

If one will look at the life of Paul he 
must see that the great apostle had a soul 
constantly wealthy with spiritual treasure. 
It made no difference how large the draft 
which might be made upon it by any exi- 
gency, by any sudden trouble, by any dif- 
ficult duty, Paul had a sufficiency of this rare 
spiritual reserve with which at once to meet 
it. We always find him equal to the occa- 
sion — beyond the occasion. He was a man 
standing in life like some tall mountain, firm 
with granite root and white with robe of 
stainless snow. Let the tempests dash them- 
selves — they can not blow away the moun- 
tain. Let the clouds gather — they cannot 
reach the altitude of its calm brow. 

They put Paul in the inner dungeon, but 
the black and slimy walls rang with his 
midnight praises. They kept him two 



70 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

years a prisoner at Caesarea, and though an 
exhaustless energy was longing for action, 
he was content to serve by standing still 
and waiting. 

The vision stood beside him at night and 
cried, Come over into Macedonia and help 
us; he was alert for the difficult duty. 

His enemies said he served his Lord for 
money — pitiable criticism, it was poor pay 
which the apostle had — but he would dis- 
arm criticism by an unrewarded service, and 
so he worked cheerfully at the trade of tent- 
making. He was " troubled but not dis- 
tressed ; perplexed but not in dispair ; per- 
secuted but not forsaken ; cast down but 
not destroyed." 

Things had a squally look at Corinth. 
There were bitter partisans. Some said, 
" I am of Paul, some, I am of Apollos, some, 
I am of Cephas, and some, I am of Christ." 
There was lapse and sin there. The old 
heathenish impurity had smutched the 
whiteness of the saints. But Paul had a 
persistent habit of looking at the brighter 
side. Things might be even worse at Cor- 



APPROPRIA TION-OF GOD. 71 

inth. He would fasten sight on the stars 
piercing the night and not on the black 
patches of the night between the shining 
stars. And so even over Corinth he has a 
thankful song breaking out at once in his 
epistle to them : I thank my God always 
on your behalf. And when at last the 
hero's work was done and death stood just 
next him, flashing from Nero's sword, Paul 
was ready, and he was king over the "king 
of horrors," bursting forth into the Victor's 
triumph — I have kept the faith, I have 
finished my course. 

How rich and furnished was that life of 
Paul ; how sublimely wealthy with spiritual 
treasure ; how much religion did for Paul ; 
how mean and ragged are our souls com- 
pared with his. And yet the wealth which 
was for him is just as much for us. 

Here is the secret of Paul's supply of 
spiritual wealth. He did not allow the 
help of God to lie neglected round him ; he 
reached forth and took it ; he made it his 
own by a personal appropriation. " I thank 
my God " he writes to the Corinthians. 



72 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

That word my contains the whole secret. 
God was his God, — God with his white 
holiness ; God with his tender pity ; God 
with his loving providence ; God with his 
strong justice ; God with his infinite re- 
sources and infinite power was his. 

Why should he not be supplied, and strong 
and overcoming. How, indeed, could he 
help being ? You might as well expect 
Vanderbilt to want his daily bread. I thank 
my God. 

And the reason why we are the poverty 
stricken souls we are, is just because we do 
not reach out and take hold of God and 
make Him ours after Paul's fashion. 

God is rich enough for us, and God is 
near enough to us. But we are like the early 
California settlers — digging ditches, repair- 
ing broken raceways, when all around us, 
paving every rivercourse and gleaming on 
every hillside, and glorifying even every 
common gully, is gold to be had simply for 
the taking. Personal appropriation of 
God ; this is the secret of an exalted life. 
Let us learn to say with Paul — My God. 



BORROWING TROUBLE. 

BEHOLD the fowls of the air, for they 
sow not, neither do they reap nor gather 
into barns, but your heavenly Father feed- 
eth them. Are ye not much better than 
they? 

Consider the lilies of the field, how they 
grow ; they toil not, neither do they spin, 
and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon, 
in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of 
these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass 
of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow 
is cast into the oven, shall He not much 
more clothe you, O ye of little faith ? 

That is to say, the fact of God's provi- 
dence is constantly displayed in this lesser 
realm of things. 

Behold the birds, the sparrows. They 
have no lands to plow and sow ; they have 
no barns into which to gather the harvest, 
yet God's providence includes them: They 
are fed. 

73 



74 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

Look at that flower. It is the lily of the 
field; it grows wild ; nobody planted it ; it 
has a lustrous bloom ; it is brilliant with 
red, orange, yellow. There was no garment 
in all the wardrobe of the great Solomon 
which could compare with such investiture 
of color. But while so fair, it is very frail. 
Its blossoming is short-lived at best. Let 
but the hot south wind blow for a few hours 
across the plain, and it lies there parched 
with all its beauty faded, and amid the dry 
grass, used for fuel for the baker's oven, the 
withered lily finds its end. And yet, though 
springing from the seeds the breezes have 
drifted any whither ; though possessed of 
such a tenuous life ; though smitten down 
so constantly by the breath of the south 
wind ; though good for nothing but to lend 
its little heat to the baker's need, — God does 
not forget to cloth it, and so gloriously. 

Now rise from this lower realm into the 
higher. Are ye not much better than these ? 

Are you not much better than these in 
power ? Birds and flowers cannot sow or 
reap or spin. Birds and flowers cannot in- 



BORROWING TROUBLE. 75 

fiuence the future. But you are better than 
the birds, than the flowers. You can toil, 
you can influence the future, you have fac- 
ulty and foresight, you are lifted above 
these by the distance of a whole heaven. 
If God so cares for these which can labor 
not and yet are fed and clothed, think you 
His blessing will not fall on you, gifted with 
power to work, and filled with force to 
mould the future ? You have ability for toil, 
and you have God. Are not these enough ? 

Are you not much better than these, too, 
in being ? Consider : God lavishes beauty 
on the lily, having not so much utility as 
beauty. At best, it can bloom a little while 
and then give forth a flash of heat ; and yet 
Solomon could not be so gloriously arrayed. 
Does not that tell us that there is no scan- 
tiness in God ? His providence is not 
meagre in its bestowals. God has more 
for us in life than a bare existence. Since 
God is bounteous to this lily, will He not be 
bounteous to you ? 

Are you not much better than these, also, 
in destiny ? " Which to-day is, and to-mor- 



76 HINTS FOR THE CHRIS TIAN II FE. 

row is cast into the oven/' — how brief that 
life ! The span of a few hours is the ut 
most measure of it, and yet how is its little 
snatch of life all blest and brightened ! 
Flowers and birds are but the " poorest 
plebeians " of God's universe ; you are its 
grand and high " patricians." Your life, 
how great, how far-reaching, how endless, 
how weighted with a divine destiny ! If the 
little life of the flower is wealthy with such 
exuberance of care, will not you be cared 
for? you, made but a little lower than the 
angels, whose bosoms are big with immor- 
tality ! 

Why, then, so borrow trouble ? God is 
no niggard. He is able to do exceeding 
abundantly above all that we can ask or 
think. Do not, by a consuming anxiety, 
distrust that providence which is warbled 
to you in every song of bird, which paints 
its large and affluent thought concerning 
you on the petal of any most fragile and 
transient flower. 



VARIABLE CHRISTIANS. 

WHEN the fight thickens, the captain 
says, "Steady, boys;" and it is 
their steadiness which pulls the soldiers 
through. Fitful soldiers are rarely useful 
ones. That is our great need to-day, 
steady Christians — men and women you 
can count on. 

Many Christians are like intermittent 
springs. They flow to-day; to-morrow you 
cannot get a thimbleful of religious activity 
out of the dried channels of their lives. 

In the constellation Perseus is a star 
which shines for two days with the bril- 
liancy of a star of the second magnitude ; 
then suddenly it loses its light, and in three 
hours drops to the radiance of a star of the 
fourth magnitude ; then, in another three 
hours and a half, it flashes up into its former 

77 



78 HIN TS FOR THE CHRIS TIA N LIFE. 

brightness, but only to grow dim again. 
Some Christians are such variable stars. 

What is the trouble? The heart is the 
nourishing power in a man. Keep thy 
heart with all diligence, for out of it are the 
issues or life. Be attentive to your love if 
you care for the life. Now abideth these 
three, faith, hope, love ; but the greatest of 
these is love ; because without love, faith 
and hope could not abide. It is the steady 
love which makes the steady life. 

It is said that in the desert of Sinai, the 
slight streams are sometimes underground; 
and that often you trace their course, not 
by the gleam of waters, but by a trace of 
moss here, a fringe of rushes there, a soli- 
tary palm, a group of sweetly flowering 
acacias. But there, amid the sands, there 
must be the steady pulsing of the water 
underground, that the moss and the rushes 
may set their greenness upon the bosom of 
the desert, and the palm cast grateful shade, 
and the acacia dispense its smell. The life 
at the surface depends upon the life beneath. 
In religion, love to the personal Christ is 



VARIABLE CHRISTIANS. 79 

life-announcing water. When that fails, 
all the verdure dies. 

The poet Southey tells a very tender 
story of a lady, whose affianced usually 
traveled by the coach to visit her, and who, 
going one day to meet him, found instead 
of her betrothed an old friend dispatched 
to tell her of her lover's sudden death. 
She screamed out, " He is dead !" then her 
reason broke, and she lost all consciousness 
of her affliction. But from that fatal mo- 
ment, for fifty years, in all seasons and in all 
weathers, she daily traversed the distance to 
the place where she expected her lover to 
alight from the passing coach ; and every 
day she said in plaintive tone, " He is not 
come yet. I will return to-morrow ;" and 
every to-morrow found her there. What kept 
the poor crazed creature steady against the 
accumulated disappointments of fifty years ? 
What could keep her but a mighty love? 

A steady love will make a steady Chris- 
tian. u How can I get it," do you ask? 
" That I do not have it is just my trouble." 
Real love is alwavs careful about little 



80 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

things. Here is a very close question for 
you. Are you not allowing yourself in a 
good many little sins which a real love 
ought to consume out of your life? Yet 
you cling to them. You do not consecrate 
these things. Try a perfect consecration to 
the Lord of even doubtful things. You 
will be surprised how the Lord will take up 
His abode in you; how strongly and stead- 
ily He will cause your love to glow ; how 
easy, unhindered, quietly constant your life 
will be. 



THE WORLD. 

CONSTANT are the warnings of the 
Scripture against the world. 

Be not conformed to this world. Love 
not the world, neither the things of the 
world. 

It is the highest achievement of the 
Christian life to say with Paul, I am cruci- 
fied unto the world. The constant enemy 
to the Christian life is the world. 

But many a battle has been lost because 
the sun struck into the warrior's eyes, or the 
dust wrapped the enemy from sight. Ex- 
actly what is this world against which we 
are warned ? Let us get sight of it. 

The world is beautiful. The sunshine 
floods it ; the harvests gladden it ; the 
mountains cast their purple shadows over 
it ; the birds sing through its summers. 
" Surely " you say, "I am not to stolidly 

81 



82 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

close my sense against a world like this." 
You say truly; you are not. 

" Then too," you say, " I am in the world. 
I am a strand braided into its society. I 
am placed here, with the world's work in 
my hands, with the world's burden on my 
shoulders, with the world's opportunities 
opening before my feet, with the world's 
duties to be done, with the world's prizes 
to be won. Surely I am not to cut myself 
away from, and turn my back upon all 
these !" No, that is true, you are not. 

When I was riding once through the 
great pine forest of the Sierra Nevada, the 
trail brought me to a vast tree, the trunk 
of which was hollowed out. The entrance 
to it was a little sheltered from the weather 
by boards nailed round it. The guide 
said that a man disgusted with the world 
had withdrawn himself into the lonely 
forest, and had been living there in that 
old tree. In the third or fourth century 
that might have been esteemed a specimen 
of Christian wisdom. But we have learned 
better the meaning of the Master's prayer 



THE WORLD. 83 

for His disciples — I pray not that Thou 
shouldst take them out of the world but 
Thou dost keep them from the evil. To be 
a hermit is not to be a Christian. You are 
not to turn your back upon the world. 

" But what world, then, am I warned 
against — what world must I fight ?" you 
ask. 

The world against which you are to strug- 
gle is not so much any particular thing or 
things as a pervading spirit. You are to 
contend with the world in the sense of 
worldliness. 

Some time ago I went into a gentleman's 
counting room and saw upon the wall, just 
above his desk, a Scripture motto. If I 
remember rightly, it was this — " Whether 
therefore ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye 
do, do all to the glory of God." 

Now it is easy enough to see that there 
are two ways of doing business. In the 
spirit contrary to that Scripture, or in the 
spirit in accordance with that Scripture. 

If that man should manage his concerns 
simply for his own glory, should be sharp in 



84 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

bargains, and squeezing in contracts, and 
mean towards employees, and dishonest 
when he saw a chance for it ; or if he should 
be even scrupulously honest, because he 
had become convinced it was on the whole 
best for him, without any reference to 
God and the Right, then it is easy to see 
that man would be worldly, the slave of 
the world ; not fighting it, but capitula- 
ting to it. His chief thought is self. 

But if that man carried out in all his 
transactions the spirit of that Scripture ; if 
he said, I am put herein this establishment 
of mine to serve God in it ; if he flashed 
the light of the Divine glory upon every 
bargain ; if he scorned dishonesty, and 
kept his hands clean from dirty tricks of 
trade because by thus doing he would 
stain his loyalty to God, then it is easy 
enough to see that though that man were 
the busiest upon the street, he would yet 
be a man unworldly; not a captive of the 
world, but a son of God ; in the world as 
he ought to be, but victor over it as he 
ought to be. His chief thought is God. 



THE WORLD\ 85 

It is against a worldly spirit which thinks 
everything of self and nothing of God that 
we are to struggle. This is the world we 
are to conquer. A man is to emblazon 
God's glory on his banner and keep that 
waving everywhere over duties, over pleas- 
ures, over habits, over bargains, over prop- 
erty, over votes, over friendships, over 
trials, over crosses, over eating, over drink- 
ing, over little things, over great things. 

The world we are to fight is— self, the 
central thought for life. The victory we 
are to win is — God, the central thought for 
life. 



BESETTING SINS. 

EVERY man has some peculiar and 
plaguing and persistent sinful ten- 
dency. Many men are grand and strong in 
many places. Every man is weak in some 
single place— signally, specially weak. 

In the world of mythology, Achilles, 
dipped in the waters of a certain river, be- 
came invulnerable. The only trouble was 
that when his mother dipped him in she, in 
in holding him by the heel, kept the heel 
dry, and thenceforward he was vulnerable 
there. It was the wound which smote his 
heel that killed him. There is an Achilles- 
heel in every one of us. 

Charles the Second of England, easy- 
going, licentious, selfish, poorest of kings, 
meanest of men, had one political maxim, 
which he declared never failed him, " Every 
man has his price." It is not true, in the 

86 



BE SETTING SETS. 87 

king's sense, that every man can be bribed ; 
but it is too sadly true that in every man 
there is some weak and unguarded spot 
where the assault of evil is peculiarly dan- 
gerous. Jacob had a strong tendency to 
deceit. Moses was apt to flame out in sud- 
den anger and impatience. David could be 
easily overcome by lust. Elijah was liable 
to lose his courage. Peter was a born 
boaster. John was addicted to vengeful 
feelings. Judas was close, greedy, grasp- 
ing, hard-hearted ; avarice was his sinful 
tendency, his besetting sin. 

Now, what was true of men in the old 
times, is true of men in these. The human 
heart, in its weakness and passion, is much 
the same whether it beat in Bible times or in 
times like ours. Every one of us has a form 
of sinfulness which coincides most naturally 
with our inclination. It may be sensual 
appetite ; it may be slothfulness ; it may be 
stinginess ; it may be proud self-assertion 
and disdain of others ; it may be lack of 
courage — want of adherence to principle ; 
it may be a bragging, fire-brand-scattering ? 



88 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

scandal-mongering tongue. It may be this 
— it may be that. Something certainly it is. 

Be sure, too, that this besetting sin is al- 
ways a specious sin. By that I mean it is a 
sin concerning which one grows marvel- 
ously skillful in the marshalling of argu- 
ments for continuance in it. 

For instance, there are many people so 
constituted that they cannot safely tamper 
with even a single glass of stimulant. There 
is a natural craving in them for it. It sets 
the nerves a-thrill; it fills with fine exhilara- 
tion ; it lifts off loads of care. There are 
some dull, sodden men who can soak in ar- 
dent spirits all their lives long with appar- 
ently little injury. But these of whom I 
speak cannot do so. They crave ; and when 
they gratify their craving, the evil thing 
burns up their manhood, their better pur- 
poses, their faculties, with quick and sad 
conflagration. 

And yet such as these are the very per- 
sons whom you will find arguing that, be- 
cause they so crave stimulant, they must 
have it. 



BESETTING SINS. 89 

Then, too, if a man is naturally slothful, 
how many reasons he will be able to find 
for taking his own ease and doing as little 
as he can. Then, too, if a man be badly 
ambitious, how, in behalf of this besetting 
sin, will he surely flatter himself that he is 
working for God, when he is really work- 
ing for human applause. Then, too, if a 
man be given to sudden flaming forth of 
anger, how will he excuse himself for it 
and allow himself in it, because it is out 
and over — because he harbors nothing. 
Then, too, I have known men one of whose 
besetting sins was a sort of harsh, cross, 
uncourteous, un-Christian bluntness, who 
are always excusing this failing by saying, 
" Well, anyway, I always speak the truth ;" 
just as though, called upon to speak the 
truth, they are therefore called upon to 
speak it in jagged and un-Christian-like 
ways. 

Ah, this besetting sin ! This sin that 
jumps with our inclinations, with the pecu- 
liar set and flow of our nature, is always a 
specious sin. The devil sometimes looks as 



go HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

white and clean as an angel of light, but he 
is the devil still. 

And so, of all sins this besetting sin is for 
every one of us the most dangerous. It is 
just the sin which at the last is likeliest to 
overmaster and lock us prisoners in its own 
destruction. For sin is evermore endowed 
with the quality of growth. He who will 
do evil of his own choice, is ultimately 
given over to evil as his master. Whoso- 
ever committeth sin is the slave of sin, 
says Christ. There is contained in sin an 
element of servitude. Allow yourself in 
conscious wrong ; put fresh coal upon the 
fire of stimulant burning in you ; flame 
forth in your scathing passion ; cut your 
friends to pieces with your sharp tongue; 
feed your avarice by refusing charity — what 
have you now done? Gratified yourself?. 
Yielded to your sinful inclination ? Yes, 
you have done that, but you have not done 
that alone; you have inevitably done a vast 
deal more. You have given your besetting 
sin a closer grasp upon you. You have 
weakened toward it your capability of re- 



BESETTIXG SINS. 91 

sistance. You have bowed still more pro- 
foundly beneath its servitude. For, as 
another says — and you know as well as I 
that the words are true— they are the very 
A B C of morals, " In every act of trans- 
gressing the law of God, there is a reflex 
action of the human will upon itself, where- 
by it becomes less able to keep that law. 
To do wrong usurps the power to do right. " 

Now, since sin thus holds in itself the 
power of growth and increasing tyranny 
through yielding to it, and since we are 
likeliest to yield to that sin which coincides 
most closely with our inclination, it is sure- 
ly evident that the sin fraught with the 
direst danger to us, is just this peculiar, per- 
sistent, desirable besetting sin. If sin at 
last wreck us, it is on this rock that we 
we shall go to pieces. 

Wherefore, let us lay aside every weight 
and the sin which does so easily beset us. 



RESISTANCE TO TEMPTATION. 

THAT we must be tempted is certain. 
How we may resist is the most vital 
of questions. I wandered once for a long 
time amid the Catacombs at Rome. These 
subterranean passages are dense with a 
darknezs which can be felt. They are in- 
tricate with tangled and sudden windings. 
Lose your way there and you may wander 
on and on, turning upon your path, till hun- 
ger hurries you and darkness bleaches you 
into death. It is a terrific place to be lost 
in. The chances are all against you. There 
is immense improbability that you ever find 
your way back again into the sweet Italian 
sunshine. But down there, among those 
Catacombs, I could not be lost, for just be- 
fore me there went a man who had threaded 
them through and through, and in his hand 

92 



RESISTANCE TO TEMPTATION. 93 

he carried a shining taper. Keeping close 
to him and keeping that light in view, I 
could not lose the way. 

Our Lord Christ has passed along the 
dark and winding avenues of temptation 
and learned them every one. He knows 
just how dark they are — just how they turn 
and twist — to just what they lead. He goes 
before every one of us and holds up for 
guidance the flaming torch of his own exam- 
ple. Keeping that light in view, we cannot 
even here lose our way. Never let yourself 
be robbed of this certainty — that tempta- 
tion was just as real to the Lord Jesus as it 
is to you and me. He is utterly our brother 
in this matter. Jesus was temptable. A 
great writer says : "We must here conceive 
the temptable as the tempted. In the per- 
son and life of Jesus there was no seeming. 
A drama where the face within the mask is 
falsehood ; where the voice is outside the 
soul ; where the person but personates an 
idea — is not here to be thought of. A real 
humanity cannot escape with a fictitious 
temptation." 



94 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN II FE. 

Solicited by temptation, there was danger 
that even Jesus might fall. Again that 
writer says: " We must conceive him as a 
subject of moral probation; he could not 
escape exposure to these trials. It be- 
hooved him in all things to be like unto his 
brethren. It might be, from the first and 
every moment, certain that he would achieve 
holiness, but could never be necessary. He 
could have been above the possibility of do- 
ing wrong only by being without the ability 
to do right." 

The light which Jesus gives, then, to the 
question, how may I resist temptation, is 
clear, actual and genuine. It is light spring- 
ing out of real conflict and real conquest. 
There were, in the life of our Lord Jesus, 
certain critical periods — certain periods 
when the forces of evil marshalled them- 
selves more numerously and violently than 
at other times. What we, b]^ way of emi- 
nence, call the temptation succeeding his 
baptism, was such a time. 

After the feeding of the five thousand, 
when the people, wonder-stricken and burn- 



RESISTANCE TO TEMPTATION. 95 

ing with enthusiasm, gathered around him 
to compel him to become King was such a 
time. When Peter took him and began to 
rebuke him, saying, " Be thy death far from 
thee, Lord; this shall not be unto thee," 
was such a time. Gethsemane was such a 
time. 

Now, a careful study of such crises in the 
life of Jesus will disclose to us the fact that 
his triumph over temptation always in- 
cluded these three elements: 

First — His resistance was instant. He 
never in the least harbored the thought of 
wrong. He said at once, Get thee behind 
me, Satan. He immediately sent the mul- 
titude away, that he might give himself to 
prayer. 

Second — It was resolute. Evil plied its 
wiles in vain. They met such hardness as 
the waves do from the rocks. 

Third — Our Lord's resistance to tempta- 
tion was thus resolute and instant because 
such a resistance was but the constant ex- 
pression of the presiding purpose of his 
life. A choice in one direction necessarily 



9 6 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

excludes a choice in an opposite direction. 
We cannot serve God and Mammon. The 
doing of the Father's will was the presiding 
choice of Jesus. Whatsoever might antag- 
onize this choice could not be in the least 
allowed. 

The absolute choice of God, like our 
Lord's choice of the Father's will, and this 
choice resolutely and instantly expressed in 
the presence of anything and everything 
hostile to it, and also such constant re- 
course to prayer as is disclosed to us in the 
pattern life, will hold us firmly in the right 
and against the wrong. 

The old school-men used to say that every 
act of sin included these three things — the 
solicitation, the delectation and the consent. 
The place for successful fighting is at the 
solicitation — there Jesus began his battlings. 
There must we begin ours, if we would be 
victorious. 



SAINTS IN SARDIS. 

SARDIS was a chief city of Asia Minor. 
It was the frequent prize of the greater 
Greek and Roman military leaders. It was 
a large market of agricultural productions, 
for the soil about it was exceedingly fertile. 
Because of its convenient position on the 
seacoast, it was as well a commercial mart 
of great importance. It was also a manu- 
facturing centre, celebrated for its cloths of 
peculiarly fine texture. Thus it was a place 
where much wealth gathered. 

It was a city devoted, too, to the heathen- 
ism of the time. Wealth brought luxury. 
Luxury gathered to itself the rot of various 
degeneracy; and the presence of a religion 
feeble in moral power and pandering to 
man's worst passions,, continually relaxed 
the moral tone. Some soil is good, some 

97 



9 s hints for the christian life. 

is worse, some is very bad. Sardis seemed 
to be a place in which the seed of the king- 
dom found peculiar difficulty of growth; 
the moral soil was bad. 

In Sardis a church had been established. 
It was, however, infected with the evil of 
the place. As a church it had lost much 
of its distinctively Christian character. It 
had a name to live, yet it was dead. It 
was more like a corpse than a living man, 
there was a little fluttering of life in it, but 
only that. Sardis was a hard place in which 
to grow a Christian church. 

Yet there was something to be com- 
mended even in Sardis. There were a few 
among those called saints who were saints 
really. There were a few whose garments 
were unstained. They had learned the di- 
vine philosophy of living in the world and 
yet being not of it. They were not re- 
cluses; they walked the streets of Sardis 
about their daily duty. They did not be- 
come monks and nuns. They did not bury 
themselves out of their Sardis world. It 
was the Master's prayer for his disciples, 



SAIiVTS IN SARD IS. 99 

not that they should be taken out of the 
world, but that they might be kept from 
the evil. These saints in Sardis were kept 
from the evil. Their consciences were true. 
Their hands were clean. Their loyalty to 
Jesus was untarnished. They carried the 
garments of their souls so carefully that 
vhey were not draggled in the worldly Sar- 
dian mud. 

Now, it is a blessed thought that when a 
man tries to do right and keep right, such 
attempt is never unnoticed. There is a 
story of a tired woman, who, driven by 
household duties, harassed and burdened 
by household cares, seeking sedulously to 
keep the wayward feet of her children in 
true paths, and discouraged at her apparent 
failures, and full of wonder why such heavy 
tasks were laid upon her, and wearied by 
the strain of her continual self sacrifice, fell 
once into a troubled sleep; and in her sleep 
she dreamed, and in her dream she saw 
how, everywhere along the difficult way of 
life, she was attended by an angel who float- 
ed just at her right shoulder, and who, with 



ioo HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, 

pleased and brightened face, wrote in a 
book he carried every slightest duty bravely 
done, every least sacrifice made ungrudg- 
ingly, every prayer which out of her weak- 
ness looked toward the divine strength; 
and the dream was an inspiration. 

The dream did not put the matter 
wrongly, except as it told the great truth 
too partially and dimly. A presence better 
than angelic is around the struggler to- 
ward the right. The great Christ does not 
lose sight of those who seek to serve him. 
Nothing done for his sake is too slight a 
thing to claim his notice. These few who 
had kept their garments white in Sardis 
were in the special remembrance of the 
Master. Sitting upon the throne of the 
universe, he held them warmly in his heart. 
He deemed them worthy of peculiar men- 
tion. He knew the difficulty amid which 
they struggled. He cheers them by his 
promise. He has a few names even in Sar- 
dis, which have not defiled their garments, 
and they shall walk with him in white, for 
they are worthy. 



SAINTS IN SARDIS. 101 

These saints in Sardis suggest three les- 
sons for us: 

First — A man must be mightier than the 
difficulties confronting him. He must live 
purely even in Sardis. 

Second — Temptation is no excuse for 
failure. Even in Sardis it was only the 
unstained saints for whom the Lord had 
praise. 

Third — Temptations may be converted 
into helpful ministers. You are not to 
count yourself peculiarly unfortunate be- 
cause you live in Sardis. Lilies deck them- 
selves with silver extorted from the black- 
est mould. Contest with Sardian tempta- 
tion, if it be but earnest, may be the best 
nutriment of the nobler life. The white- 
robed pass into whiteness through tribula- 
tion. Purity in Sardis means much. Said 
Jesus, They shall walk with me in white, 
for they are worthy. Said Paul, Our light 
affliction, which is but for a moment, work- 
eth for us a far more exceeding and eternal 
weight of glory. 



TRIUMPH OVER THE FUTURE. 

WE are told that when the mob arrest- 
ed the Lord Jesus in the garden, 
a Jesus, knowing all things that should come 
upon him, went forth." 

Into the future of which that mob was 
the frowning gate he passed not unknow- 
ing, as you and I must into ours, but know- 
ing. Nor do the Scriptures allow us to re- 
strict his fore-knowledge of the future to 
his own special experience of the death and 
resurrection and ascension which were to 
come. Constantly is this divine attribute 
of all-knowingness as to all men and all 
things ascribed to Christ in Scripture. In 
one place we read: But Jesus did not com- 
mit himself unto them, because he knew all 
men. And, now we are sure that thou 
k no west all things, is written in another 
Scripture. 

102 



TRIUMPH OVER THE FUTURE. 103 

Not knowing — is our word about the fu- 
ture. Knowing all things — is Christ's. 

In one of the Conversations of a Satur- 
day afternoon, which we often have in our 
church parlor, talking together of this very 
matter, one said, not in these words pre- 
cisely, but in effect — the particularity of the 
Lord's knowledge of me, the fact that his 
shining vision draws its radiant circle 
round the " all things" that do touch me, 
and that can touch me, is a great help and 
comfort. Only, I am constantly hindered 
in the reception of the comfort it ought to 
bring me, by the impossibility of my con- 
ception of such sort of knowledge. I look 
at myself, and I find that I am dazed and 
dazzled by details. Just about myself alone, 
a single unit amid the multitude, there are 
so many " all things" to be known; there is 
such a multiplicity and complexity of de- 
tail even about myself. Then when I stand 
amid some thronging crowd and think of 
the " all things" which it is affirmed the 
Lord must know about every one of this 
mass of beings, separate and singular, there 



io4 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

is such an infinite bulk and tangle of detail 
that my poor thought breaks under the 
weight of it, and I cannot help wondering 
if the Lord's knowledge must not break 
under the burden of it too. And I cannot 
help questioning if some of the " all things" 
which now come to me, and are to come to 
me in the future, may not possibly slip out 
of and away from the including knowing 
of my Lord. 

I am sure such skepticism of our future, 
grasped and held utterly in the attention of 
our Lord, is not uncommon. 

The answer to it is two-fold, Scriptural 
and rational. The Scriptural answer is the 
constant statement of the Bible that all 
things and all men are held within the sen- 
sitive and certain knowledge of the Lord 
Christ. 

The rational answer is that every human 
mind is seen by us to be great and over- 
coming, in just the proportion in which it 
is seen to be not dazed and baffled by de- 
tail. Notice and comprehension of detail 
is the very marjc by which a great mind is 



TRIUMPH OVER THE FUTURE. 105 

distinguished from a small one, even among 
ourselves. That man is mightiest in busi- 
ness who is mightiest in his memory and 
care of details, marshalling them to his 
money-making purpose. That man is 
mightiest in literature whose principles are 
the results of the widest and most accurate 
deduction from the most multifarious of 
observed and remembered details. That 
man is mightiest in war, in whose mind the 
farthest and minutest details of men and 
equipment and configuration of country, 
are the most closely and clearly grasped. 
Everywhere power of attention to detail is 
the signal of a capacious and shining intel- 
lect. That is the little head which forgets 
details, and blurs them and sees them but 
as undistinguishable meshes of unknown 
quantities. 

Such all-knowledge then, of all things and 
all men, is a necessary attribute and quality 
of a mind infinite. That the Lord should 
know all things about the future, is proof 
that he is Lord. Even as the disciples said: 
Now we are sure that thou knowest all 



106 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

things; by this we believe that thou earnest 
forth from God. 

But there is another very precious truth 
about this "going forth" of our all-know- 
ing Lord. Our Lord goes into the future, 
not only knowing the "all-things" of it, 
but also, that he may use himself in that 
future for the help and defense of those 
who trust him. 

1 do not know a more pathetic word in 
all the Scripture than this which tells the 
answer of Jesus to that mob, and the reason 
of his answer. Jesus answered: I have told 
you that I am he; if, therefore, ye seek me, 
let these go their way; that the saying might 
be fulfilled which he spoke, of them which 
thou gavest me have I lost none. " If, there- 
fore, ye seek me, let these go their way," — 
all the sacrificial cadences of the atonement 
sound in that sentence. All the wonder, 
and the pathos, and the self-upyielding of 
the cross is there. I go unto the future 
knowing all things, and I go that I may 
cover and protect those who trust me; that 
I may lose none of them; that I may use 



TRIUMPH OVER THE FUTURE. 107 

that future for them, even though I clearly 
see it holds the cross with its horrid clasp- 
ing of death and shame. O ! Sacred Head 
now wounded, knowing it all, thou enterest 
the future that the thorns may cut thy 
brow, and thus a crown of life encircle the 
brows of these. 

Grasp the double meaning of this great 
Scripture, disclosing so plainly the inner 
heart of our great High Priest. While we 
cannot know our future, that future is yet 
held and kept in the grasp of an Infinite 
Intelligence, and in the hand of an Infinite 
Sacrificial Heart. Divine knowledge, divine 
love — it is under such control that the misty 
years to come are held. 

Faith, then, in the Infinite mind, and in 
the Infinite heart, is our victory over the 
future. Even in this narrow present, I may 
win it. Through faith in such a Christ, 
though I can stand only in the little van- 
ishing what is, I may conquer beforehand 
all that is to come. - 

I was studying crystals not long since in 
an admirable cabinet. There were shown 



108 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

me some diamonds in the rough, just as 
some eye had seen them, and some hand 
had seized them amid the gravel in South 
Africa. I do not think you could have told 
them for diamonds. All their wonderful 
far-shooting gleams and inward fires of 
lustre were hidden. They needed the em- 
ery-wheels and the fierce attrition of their 
own diamond dust to clean off their 
scratches, to remove the microscopic par- 
ticles clinging to their sides, to straighten 
the ruder lines of their crystallization, that 
all the glory brimming in their hearts might 
get chance for flashing out. If those dia- 
monds are to become what they might be- 
come, the future must hold for them the 
whirling emery-wheels and the harsh filing. 

Yes, that is so. And I am sure, also, that 
this is so, that if ever I am to be conformed 
to the image of his Son, I must meet the 
emery wheels and culturing diamond dust 
of trial. 

But of this, too, I may be sure; Infinite 
intelligence and Infinite sacrificial love 
holds all the future, and no wheel that is to 



TRIUMPH OVER THE FUTURE. 109 

whirl within it shall turn even once too 
many times. 

Trust in such knowing, and such loving, 
can disarm the future. 



WHEN FAITH IS TRIER 

THERE was Elijah by the brook Cher- 
ith. And it came to pass, after a 
while, that the brook dried up, because 
there had been no rain in the land. The 
truer rendering is, For the brook began 
to fail. Day by day it grew slender and 
slenderer still. At last, only a hot and 
muddied pool stood here and there amid 
the " staring stones " of the dried channel. 
What should Elijah do when the brook 
should be entirely gone ? It was a faith 
test which had come to him. It was a faith 
test of the severest kind. For as Mr. Kitto 
has well said concerning it, " It is such slow 
processes that try faith most of all. Many 
possess the faith for sudden, great, heroic 
deeds, for one who can maintain his faith 
unshaken in the midst of such slow trials 

no 



WHEX FAITH IS TRIED. in 

as this." Day by day the brook failing. 
Day by day Elijah getting apparently 
nearer the torture and the death of thirst. 

When you get into such a plight as this — 
as some time or other in your life you sure- 
ly must; when your brook Cherith begins 
to dry away; when success begins gradu- 
ally to pass into disaster and defeat; when 
hopes fail; when duty wears a hard and 
unrequiting look ; when business shrivels 
because you will not be dishonest in it ; 
when you seem to be strangely out of ad- 
justment with your circumstances ; ham- 
pered, hindered ; and when you still feel 
that God has put you there by your brook 
Cherith, but has not yet opened for you a 
door into some better way or place — then, 
for such a time, let me commend to you the 
example of this servant of the Lord, Elijah. 
His faith stood the slow, hard test. He did 
not quit Cherith rashly and undirected be- 
cause it was drying up; he did not go wan- 
dering round searching for some hap-haz- 
ard greener locality. He drank of the 
failing water, and took his bread from the 



1 12 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, 

ravens, and waited. He was obedient to do 
the duty, and for the future he trusted 
God. 

Thus are we to do under like circum- 
stances. Not to grow despondent; not to 
become petulant; not to go foraging about 
for something wealthier, when we have the 
conviction that our place is still here by 
Cherith ; but to stay there, drinking even 
of the failing, turbid, heated brook, and 
trusting God. 

And as certainly as there came deliver- 
ance to Elijah, shall there come, from God's 
hand, deliverance to you. Wait on the 
Lord. Be of good courage, and he shall 
strengthen thine heart. Wait, I say, on the 
Lord. 



THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 



SOME STRUCTURAL FACTS OF LIFE. 



THE first is that of difference. It is won- 
derful to let the eye sweep over the 
central oceanic plains. The sensation is 
that of vastness and smoothness. The 
reach of plain is level almost perfectly. On 
to where the earth and the sky appear to 
meet, there is no intrusion of any ridge, or 
hill, or mountain. There is only one broad 
and equal expanse of sand and sage-bush, 
or of waving grass, and that is all. But 
that is not like life. Human society is not 
a level plain. 

It is wonderful, as well, to stand under 
the shadow of the mountains. Take the 
range of the snowy mountains in the Val- 
ley of the Yellowstone — a succession of vol- 

113 



ii4 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

canic cones ; some forced to the height of 
ten or eleven thousand feet above the sea; 
some of lowlier altitude. Between the 
mountains, dark and deep ravines. And as 
the peaks are different in height, so are 
they, as well, in shape. Some are pointed 
like the Swiss Aiguilles; some are rounded 
into a smoothness beautiful; some are jag- 
ged on their slopes, and awful with con- 
torted surface. They are mountains, and 
yet the seal of difference is set upon them. 
Though belonging to the same range, they 
are individual. Your mountain range, and 
not your level plain — that is like life. Upon 
it the seal of difference is set. 

This is the foundation idea upon which 
God has built society. Society is the moun- 
tain range, and not the level plain. 

Men are different. Men are born differ- 
ent. Men are different in endowment, 
in providential appointment, in mental 
strength, in physical. Or, to come back to 
the Scripture, always true to the facts of 
life: For the Kingdom of Heaven is as a 
man traveling into a far country, who 



THE PARABLE OE THE TALENTS. 115 

called his own servants and delivered unto 
them his goods. And unto one he gave five 
talents, to another two, and to another one; 
to every man according to his several abil- 
ity; and straightway took his journey. 

Difference — that is a fact of life. 

But there is another structural fact of 
life equally evident. This is similarity. 
Though the mountains are different from 
the plain and different from each other, 
they are similar in this — that they all do 
rise out of the plain; that they are all made 
up of varying amounts of the same sub- 
stances — of rocks and sand and trees and 
snow. Different they are, yet similar. 
Thus is it too with men and women, 'lhey 
are similar in the fact that they all partake 
of the same humanity. They are also fur- 
ther similar in this: unlike as they may be 
in brain and body, in strength or in weak- 
ness, in providential opportunity, or com- 
parative want of chance — in all that which 
goes to make up what we may call the en- 
dowment of a human being — they are alike 
in this, that everybody has some brain, 



n6 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

some strength, some skill, some opportu- 
nity. 

Or, to come back again to the Scripture, 
and to use the comprehensive Scriptural 
word, while, according to their several 
ability, one servant may be entrusted with 
five, another with two, and another with 
only one — all are yet entrusted with some 
talent. Different as men and women are, 
they are yet, in as deep and real a way, 
alike. 

Here is a third structural fact of life — 
responsibility. Different each from each, we 
are, in amount of talent; similar each to 
each, we are, in the possession of some 
talent. And over every one, each and all, 
arches this firmament of responsibility. 
Every man has an idea of the ought. "Thou 
oughtest therefore to have put my money to 
the exchangers, and then, at my coming, I 
should have received mine own with usury." 
Thou oughtest — there is something in the 
heart of every one which springs immedi- 
ately responsive. Ought — that is the lord- 
liest word and the weightiest any man can 



THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 117 

speak. When a man comes to this con- 
sciousness — I ought — that is the end of ar- 
gument. It is the expression of responsi- 
bility. It is the tugging of the tie which 
binds man to God. It is the grip of God 
on man. 

That man has it — this inborn, instinctive 
feeling of responsibility upward and God- 
ward, is a huge and perfect argument 
against the notion that man is nothing 
more than a development, an evolution of 
the brute. 

And this is further to be said concerning 
this matter of responsibility, that by no 
means can it be gotten away from, or ex- 
cuse made before its judicial and constant 
inviolability. 

That was a very common thing to do in 
ancient and Eastern society, — dig a hole in 
the ground, and put one's money in it and 
cover it, so that none but the owner could 
find it. A man then was very often his 
own banker. 

One of the saddest signs of the finan- 
cially sad times through which we have 



1 1 8 HIN TS FOR THE CHRIS TIA N LIFE. 

been passing, has been that so many pro- 
fessedly Christian men have been faithless 
to their trusts, and have made the deposi- 
tories for people's money now — savings 
banks and life insurance institutions — not 
so safe as a hole in the ground. 

Well, one of these servants in the parable 
took his talent and put it in the ground. 
That is to say, he did not use his talent for 
his Lord's sake — for his Lord's glory. He 
was false to this fact of responsibility. And 
for this falseness nothing could excuse him. 

If he did not wish the trouble of its use 
for his Lord's sake, and was lazy, and 
would rather let it lie in the ground than 
bother with it — this did not excuse him. 

If he feared mistake, that in attempting 
to increase his talent for his Lord, he might 
lose it instead of doubling it, and therefore 
thought the safest thing to do was to re- 
fuse to use it, letting it lie there in the 
ground — this nervous, morbid fear of mis- 
take and possible mischief did not in any 
wise excuse him. 

If, as he said he did, he had really fallen 



THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 119 

into wrong conceptions about his Lord, 
esteemed him a hard man, reaping where 
he had not sown and gathering where he 
had not strewn— if, filled with such false 
conceptions of his Lord, he had therefore 
missed his duty — these wrong conceptions 
did not excuse him. 

If, as is more probable, he himself con- 
jured up such a false notion of his Lord's 
character, in order that he might throw the 
blame for his failure over on to his Lord's 
shoulders — just as men do now, saying God 
is severe, hard, vengeful, we cannot serve 
him — if this was his idea, as I think most 
probable, why, notwithstanding, he could 
not get the blame for failure even on his 
Lord's shoulders; it would stay on his own. 

In no way could he dodge responsibility. 
Falseness to trust brought doom. 

And it is worthy of notice that this whole 
parable points its warning and admonition 
not toward the misuse, but severely and 
simply toward the non-use of that witfi 
which the servant was entrusted. As a 
most thoughtful commentator has sug- 



120 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

gested, the sin against which Christ ad- 
monishes his disciples here, is not that of 
the unjust steward, for here is no wasting 
of goods ; nor that of the prodigal, for here 
is no riotous living; nor that of the unmer- 
ciful servant, for here is no indifference to 
humanity. The sin against which Christ 
admonishes his disciples here is simply the 
sin of neglect; of, for any reason whatsoever, 
omitting to use whatever of endowment 
God may have conferred upon one. Non- 
use is a sin as utterly as misuse. Neglect 
is as wrong as defiant disobedience. The 
pivot-word in the parable is this — unprofit- 
able servant; servant false to this fact of re- 
sponsibility through non-use. 

This, then, is the third structural fact of 
life: Thou oughtest therefore. Trusts of 
whatever sort from God are to be used for 
God. This solemn over-arching of respon- 
sibility is something unescapable. 

Here is a fourth structural fact of life — 
opportunity. " Thou oughtest therefore to 
have put my money to the exchangers. " 

There was no need, O servant, that my 



THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. 121 

talent, which I gave to thee in trust, lie 
ignobly in a hole in the ground, resting in 
non-use. You were not, in any wise, com- 
pelled to such administration of your trust; 
the door of opportunity stood open. There 
were exchangers on every side. 

And what was true for this servant is 
true for everybody. Next door to every- 
body there is some sort of an exchanger. 

You may not be put in trust by God in 
the same kind or to the same degree as 
others. That is true. Men are different. 
You are entrusted by God in some kind 
and to some degree, as also others are. 
That is true. Men are similar. 

You ought to use all that with which you 
are entrusted for God's glory. That is 
true. If you take the wings of the morn- 
ing and fly to the uttermost parts of the 
earth, you can not escape the dominion of 
responsibilty. 

For the use of that with which you have 
been entrusted — for the productive invest- 
ment of your talent toward God's glory, 
there is waiting for every one some ex- 



1 22 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

changer. That is true. Within reach of 
everybody's hand there is the door of some 
opportunity. 

So then our study of this parable reveals 
to us these four structural facts of life: dif- 
ference, similarity, responsibility, oppor- 
tunity. 



TRUE WORSHIP. 

TRUE worship is something universal. 
It is to be in everything. It is for all 
times and for all spots. 

The hour cometh when ye shall neither 
in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, 
worship the Father — were our Lord's words 
to the Samaritan woman. Jew and Samar- 
itan had been fighting about places for 
worship. Jesus comes to say, neither this 
place nor that place — but all places for it. 

We are all of us more Jewish or Samari- 
tan than we think. We are all of us rear- 
ing our Jerusalems or clinging to our Geri- 
zims. We are all of us sectionalizing reli- 
gion — gathering it to special places, special 
times, special things; calling these sacred, 
those profane. 

There was an old man in New England 
who combined the occupations of farmer^ 

123 



124 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

horse dealer, and colporteur. In his " works 
of mercy," as he called them, he distributed 
tracts gratuitously, sold Bibles and other 
religious books at cost to those who could 
pay for them, gave them away to those who 
could not. " But/' said the old man — not 
flippantly, as it might seem, but earnestly — 
"when I start on a work of mercy and stop 
to deal in horses I never have good luck; 
the fact is, / don t want the Lord around when 
Fm trading horses." 

There it is. The tract and Bible distri- 
bution was that man's Gerizim or Jerusa- 
lem; but worship held simply there would 
not prevent him from being over sharp in a 
bargain when horses were in question. 
That is sectionalizing religion; piling up 
Gerizims and building Jerusalems for it; 
forgetting its universality. 

There was a tottering colored man who 
gained his living by cobbling shoes. His 
work was not elegant ; he was not deft- 
handed; but he was thorough. Said one 
to him, "My friend, after this cobbling on 
earth is done, how about the other world ? 



TRUE WORSHIP. 125 

Have you any hope for a better world ?" 
" Ah, master," answered he, " I am nothing, 
as I told you, but a poor cobbler; but I 
feel when I sit here that the Good Master 
is looking at me, and when I take a stitch, 
it is a stitch, and when I put on a heel-tap, 
it is not paper but good leather." 

That is the true and Christian idea as 
over against the Jewish or Samaritan. Re- 
ligion not in Jerusalem or Gerizim only, 
but religion in everything. Worship not 
only in special places and about certain 
things, but worship in all places and about 
all things. True worship is neither in this 
mountain nor in that, but is in this and 
that and in all others. It is an atmosphere 
in which the whole life is to breathe and 
live and be carried on. It has to do with 
Saturday as well as Sunday ; with the bar- 
gain as well as with the prayer; with the 
table of the daily bread as well as with the 
table of the Lord. 

They say that two million tons of the 
purest silver are held in solution by the sea, 
enriching each drop of its waters. It is 



1 26 HINTS FOR THE CHRIS TIA N LIFE. 

thus that a pure worship is to interpene- 
trate the life, touching and glorifying its 
shyest thought, its most common action. 
True worship is for Jerusalem and forGeri- 
zim and for Nazareth, too. It is for church 
and street. It is for sacrament and for the 
daily service of the store, or shop, or school, 
or home. 



FAITHFULNESS IN HUMBLE PLACES. 

THAT is a very tender story concern- 
ing faithfulness in humble places 
which Jean Ingelow has related for us. 

It was in one of the Orkney Islands, far 
beyond the north of Scotland. On the 
coast of this island there stood out a rock, 
called the Lonely Rock, very dangerous to 
navigators. 

One night, long ago, there sat in a fish- 
erman's hut ashore, a young girl toiling at 
her spinning-wheel, looking out upon the 
dark and driving clouds, and listening anx- 
iously to the wind and sea. 

At last the morning came; and one boat, 
that should have been riding on the waves, 
was missing. It was her father's boat. 
And, half a mile from the cottage, her 
father's body was found, washed up upon 

127 



128 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

the shore. He had been wrecked against 
this Lonely Rock. 

That was more than fifty years ago. The 
girl watched her father's body, according 
to the custom of her people, till it was laid 
in the grave; then she lay down on her bed 
and slept. When the night came she arose 
and set a candle in her casement, as a bea- 
con to the fishermen, and a guide. All 
night long she sat by the candle, trimmed 
it when it flickered down, and spun. 

As many hanks of yarn as she had spun 
before, for her daily bread, she spun still, 
and one hank over, for her nightly candle. 
And from that time to the time of the tell- 
ing of this story, for fifty years, through 
youth, maturity, into old age, she has 
turned night into day. And, in the snow- 
storms of winter, in the serene calms of 
summer, through driving mists, deceptive 
moonlight, and solemn darkness, that north- 
ern harbor has never once been without the 
light of that small candle. However far 
the fisherman might be standing out to sea ? 
he had only to bear down straight for that 






FAITHFULNESS IN HUMBLE PLA CES. 129 

lighted window, and he was sure of safe 
entrance into the harbor. And so, for all 
these fifty years, that tiny light, flaming 
thus out of devotion and self-sacrifice, has 
helped and cheered and saved. 

Surely this was finding chance for service 
in a humble place. Surely this was lowli- 
ness glorified by faithfulness. Surely the 
smile of the Lord Christ must have fol- 
lowed along the beams of that poor candle, 
glimmering from that humble window, as 
they went wandering forth to bless and 
guide the fishermen, tossing in their little 
boats upon the sea. 

Surely there is for every one of us a place 
and chance to guide and help as great as 
that. Certainly we may, at least, keep 
shining at the window of our lives, how 
lowly soever they may be, the truth we feel 
and know. Certainly there are some at 
home, in store, on street, upon whom those 
beams will fall; certainly such light shall 
yield them help, courage, guidance. 

No Christian's chance can be so slim and 
small that the simple and constant shining 



130 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

of a Christian faith and hope will not illu- 
minate somebody's darkness, will not serve 
somebody for leading and for cheer. And if 
we cannot be some great, strong Eddystone 
Lighthouse, furnished with patent reflectors, 
and flinging its rays across the waves for 
forty miles, guiding the mighty steamers 
and the huge ships, let us not refuse to 
keep the little light of a steady and humble 
Christian profession burning at our small 
window. 

Some weary, doubting, toiling fisherman 
shall see it and be glad. And it were worth 
the living to have led and pointed even such 
an one into safe harbor. 



DIFFICULT DUTY. 

THAT is a suggestive incident, of the 
rod changed to a serpent and the ser- 
pent to a rod again. 

God has called Moses to a threatening 
duty. All sorts of obstacles marshal them- 
selves before it; Egypt is a powerful king- 
dom; Moses has already offended the throne; 
the Israelites are greatly valuable to the 
Egyptians. Besides, Moses is not eloquent, 
and thus is himself unable to impress, upon 
the people the fact of his divine commis- 
sion. Every way he seems to himself to be 
unequal to the towering task. 

So Moses sets himself to manufacture a 
whole chapter of excuses. We are very 
often like him. Our humility is astonish- 
ing when a difficult duty confronts. We 
are quite ready to slander ourselves even. 
We are ready to yield the slightest assump- 

131 



132 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

tion of power. We are on the hunt for 
opiates for conscience. Moses does not 
stand alone in his searches for excuses. 

But God teaches him, in significant sym- 
bol, the true method of accomplishment. 
Moses is standing with a shepherd's crook 
in his hand. "What is that in thy hand?" 
God asks. " A rod," says Moses. A shep- 
herd's crook, the symbol of his present con- 
dition. "Cast it on the ground," is the 
command. It becomes a serpent — some- 
thing dangerous and formidable, from 
which Moses fled, exactly typifying the dif- 
ficutly of his duty, and his own repugnance 
to it.. 

A serpent was a common Egyptian em- 
blem. Moses was well versed in the learn- 
ing of the Egyptians. He knew and felt 
the meaning of this transformation. It was 
Egypt which was thus not obscurely point- 
ed out as the enemy of God and of the 
chosen people ; and as Moses fled from the 
serpent, he feared to grapple with the hos- 
tile Egpytian power. " Put forth thy hand 
and catch it," is yet again the divine com- 



DIFFICUL T DUTY. 133 

mand. Moses obeys. At once the serpent 
is in his hand a rod — the symbol of author- 
ity. The shepherd's crook is now the rod 
of God, with which Moses is to triumph 
over the serpent and lead God's people out 
of Egypt into the promised land. 

The teaching is significant and evident. 
"What is formidable to weak faith and hes- 
itating obedience, becomes a rod of power 
as soon as the decisive act is done." 

First — Often before us rises duty diffi- 
cult. It seems to us armed and hateful 
with the serpent's fang. We dread at- 
tempts towards its accomplishment, and 
flee as Moses did. 

Second — Because we dread and flee, we 
are not thus able to pass out from the 
shadow of the command. That remains. 

It is very often loosely said that God 
never appoints a duty for us for which we 
do not possess present ability. Nothing 
could be falser. We damage ourselves by 
sin; we drain our ability; we make our- 
selves unable to obey the command of God, 
and then imagine that God adjusts the 



134 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, 

command to our weakened power. But 
God changes not, nor does His law. 

Duty is duty, whether we are unable to 
accomplish it or not. The man who has so 
started a craving for liquor in himself that 
he cannot live except to satisfy it, is not, 
therefore, excused for his drunkenness. 
He may flee from and dread the serpent 
duty of reform, and say he cannot, but it is 
not the less true that he ought. 

Third — At the moment of an obedient at- 
tempt at difficult duty, a divinely-granted 
supernatural power comes down to lift 
weakened ability up to the measure of the 
command. There is the serpent — danger- 
ous, hostile, dreaded. God orders Moses 
to grasp it. When that is done, the serpent 
becomes a rod. It is overcome. It is no 
longer dangerous. It is no longer hostile. 
The duty which the serpent symbolizes, 
Moses did accomplish through the Lord his 
God. He did overcome Pharaoh. He did 
shatter the shackles which bound his coun- 
trymen. He did lead them through the 
winding wilderness journey. He did con- 



DIFFICULT DUTY. 135 

duct them to the gates of the promised 
land. The serpent duty, through the divine 
aid down-falling, was accomplished. 

I can do all things through Christ which 
strengtheneth me — that is only the New 
Testament explanation of the Old Testa- 
ment symbol. 

Fourth — The serpent, a symbol of diffi- 
cult and distasteful duty, when grasped, 
becomes a rod — the symbol of authority 
and power. Obedient grapplingwith duty, 
however difficult soever, reacts upon the 
character, strengthens it in goodness, up- 
lifts it, crowns it. Contest with the ser- 
pent sin puts into a man's hand the rod of 
power over sin. 

The weakest of us need not despair. 
Through Christ we may compel the ser- 
pent even, into a ministry toward our 
growth and strength. 



RELIGION IN THE HOME. 

THE holiest and highest place for any 
man is his own house. If he is to serve 
Christ anywhere, he ought to serve him there 
first and chiefly. If the light of religion is 
to glorify any place, its sweetest and 
whitest radiance should centre there; fo-r 
the home is the place of relationships the 
closest, the sacredest, the most controlling. 
Look at some of these relationships. 
Somehow amid the world's crowd, two 
hearts have found each other out. By 
strange and subtle magnetism they have 
been attracted each to each. For them the 
double life blends into a single, larger life. 
Husband and wife they stand together — he 
to be to her the king; she to be to him the 
queen, graced and garlanded, in an equal 
royalty. The husband — he has promised 
her affection undivided, purity untarnished, 

136 



RELIGION IN THE HOME. 13 7 

devotion unwasting, a manly arm to pro- 
tect, a manly strength to lean upon, a 
manly energy and skill and capacity to 
support. He has told her she may trust 
him — and with a trust so utter that she 
may dare to stake upon it the wealth of 
her affection, her hopes of happiness, the 
sanctity of her womanhood — her whole 
destiny, 

I wonder if we think enough of what a 
woman risks by marriage. For a man it is 
a critical circumstance; but for a woman it 
is unspeakably momentous. A man has 
other things with which to fill his hands 
and time,— his business, the struggle of 
the daily life, the necessary mingling with 
the great world. His life sweeps a wider 
circle. The wreck of the home cannot be 
so direful a thing for him, terrible as it 
must be. But the woman leaves every- 
thing to find her whole life in a home with 
him. She shuts behind her the old parental 
door. She lays off from herself the name 
her parents gave her. She has cut herself, 
as no man ever can cut himself, away from 



138 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, 

old associations. At this man's call, she 
brings her life, and risks it at his feet. 

And coming thus, walking fearlessly, 
lighted by the torch of love, among the 
shadows of such a risk, she promises to be 
a help-meet for him; she pledges that in 
one place he shall not be misunderstood ; 
that at one fountain, sympathy shall never 
fail; that through the various experiences 
of life, her heart shall strike constant chime 
with his. 

So, in these two hearts thus married into 
one, the home begins. Bound together in 
a union the closeness of which can be illus- 
trated in no way so well as by that mysti- 
cal union which subsists between the be- 
liever and his Lord, the two separate rills 
of life, mingling to form a deeper and 
broader river, flow on. And then, flowing 
out of this relationship, another relation- 
ship arises. God puts a babe into the 
parents' hands; another life has issued out 
of theirs, to draw from theirs its sustenance, 
to get from theirs its bent, to receive from 
theirs its deepest and most lasting culture, 



RELIGION IN THE HOME. 139 

to take from theirs more absolutely and 
awfully than from any other source, the 
shaping of its eternal destiny. 

So do these relationships of the home 
stand furthest back and deepest down of 
any. It is back here in the home that the 
springs of life are found. The home stands 
behind the church. It ought to be home 
first, and church next, always. If religion 
is anywhere to make life sweet and pure 
and beautiful, of all places it should impart 
its sanctity back here amid the springs of 
life welling up in the home. Make the 
fountain sweet, and the waters will be 
sweet. Sanctify the home, and you sanc- 
tify the fountain. First of all, certainly 
then, because of these relationships so 
sacred and so profound, are we bound to 
carry into our homes before all other places 
the patience and the sweetness and the 
sacrifices and the peace of religion. 



RELIGION AND HOME LIFE. 

SACRED and clasping as are our home 
relationships, their very commonness 
and constancy are apt to induce a kind of 
forgetfulness of them. It is a law of life 
that continuance of impression results in 
lack of sensibility. Mr. Ruskin tells us that 
of all people in the world, those are least 
alive to the majesty of the mountain height, 
to the solemnity of the mountain shadow, 
to the serenity of the mountain peace, who 
dwell among the mountains. It is the man 
who is not born in God's great temple of 
the Alps, and can bend in the presence of 
those white altars only now and then, who 
is the most deeply smitten with their awe 
and subdued unto their sanctity. Constant 
repetitions of impressions produce for the 
Swiss inhabitant dullness of sensibility. 
What is true there is true everywhere. 
140 



RELIGION AND HOME LIFE, 141 

The pressure and contact of these home re- 
lationships is so constant that one is in 
danger of becoming wonted into heedless- 
ness of them. One may go on here in easy 
violation of duty, in daily forgetfulness of 
the holiest promises, because of a stupid 
dullness of sensibility. It needs the con- 
stant quickening of religion; it needs the 
fresh alertness of a religious spirit that 
goes through life with the constant ques- 
tion, " How can I please my Lord," to keep 
the nerve of sensibility alive and thrilling 
to the uninterrupted touch of those home 
relationships. 

We need religion in our homes, too, be- 
cause of the closeness of the bonds binding 
us together there. It is a common proverb, 
and it is as true as it is common, that no 
man is a hero to his own valet. We are 
not angels; we are only men and women, 
and we share the imperfections of manhood 
and womanhood. We are not perfect ap- 
ples; we are speckled apples, all of us. I 
do not care how deep and sweet and ten- 
der and accordant love may render the 



142 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

home life, it cannot but happen that in the 
close contact, in the every-day openness and 
disclosure of the home, our bad points will 
come out. No family is made up of per- 
fectly straight sticks, but crooked ones. 
And when they are piled together in the 
closeness of home life the crookedness will 
appear. The man and woman married the 
most utterly, married along the whole line 
of their natures, must yet find some point 
where there is not complete contact. There 
is dissimilarity of taste, dissimilarity of 
temper, there has been dissimilarity of ed- 
ucation. Before musicians can pour forth 
a perfect harmony, they must bring their 
instruments into tune. Before two hearts 
can perfectly strike together, they must be 
keyed to the same note, and that cannot be 
altogether done before marriage. The exact 
real self does not appear in courtship. It 
is the best self, the self dressed in the best 
wardrobe of manners and sentiment and 
sacrifice that appears then. After marriage 
the self puts on its common habits and ap- 
pears for what it is. Then each real self 



RELIGION AND HOME LIFE, 143 

must adjust itself to each real self; then 
must each bear and forbear. Then must 
any incompatibility be met and mastered 
by a mutual charity which suffereth long 
and is kind, which never faileth. 

Now it is just here in this closeness and 
disclosure of the home that religion is most 
needed. One must enter into the Christian 
method of finding life by losing it; the soul 
must possess itself with the sweetness of a 
Christian patience. A Christian love must 
put its foot upon the neck of any miserable 
pride of self-assertion and keep it there. A 
Christian confession of wrong, and a Chris- 
tian forgiveness of wrong, must be as quick 
or spontaneous as the breath. Christ in 
calmness, in tenderness, in self sacrifice, 
must dwell in the heart of each. Then 
shall that home be Christian. Then the 
nearest symbol of the Heaven for which we 
yearn shall be that earthly home. Of all 
places, it is the home which must get on 
the worst without religion. 



A CHANCE FOR SERVICE. 

ALMOST the last command which Jesus 
gave was this: Feed my lambs. It 
is well enough to think what a large oppor- 
tunity for Christian service must open for 
any one of us through obedience to this 
command. 

John Falk of Weimar was a great Chris- 
tian. It was a terrible time in Weimar. 
Napoleon the Great was scathing Europe. 
The dark nights of winter were lighted 
with burning homesteads. Almost all the 
men in the little duchy were driven off to 
the wars and killed. Plague and famine 
were ravaging. Orphans were numbered 
by the thousand; in one small village sixty 
orphans wept both parents. 

John Falk himself had a brood of six 
sweet children. He could not keep the 
pestilence from smiting them. Four out of 

144 



A CHANCE FOR SERVICE, 145 

the six were carried off, and, as he declared, 
he buried with them the best part of his 
own life in their graves. 

But what did John Falk do ? Uselessly 
bewail his fate and sit in sackcloth with 
folded hands ? Call God cruel, and declare 
that Providence was a grand mistake ? No. 
John Falk was a great Christian. He heard 
this command of Christ: Feed my lambs. 
He would obey it. He gathered the home- 
less children off the streets and waysides. 
He took them for his own. " Come in," he 
cried, " God has taken my four angels and 
spared me that I might be your father." 
And out of that beginning sprang the " In- 
ner Mission " of Germany, which in orphan- 
ages and training schools has spread the 
kindly roof of Christian homes over thou- 
sands of homeless children, and been a large 
element in making Protestant Germany the 
mighty nation she has become. 

Now of course I do not mean to say that 
we ought all of us to do, or that we all can 
do, as John Falk did. Our necessity is not 
the same. Our circumstances are different. 



146 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

But I do mean to say that we all of us have 
a chance for Christian service just there 
where John Falk found his. 

We are very sentimental in our religion. 
As Falk himself once wrote, "We all like 
the glory on Tabor, but we cannot bear to 
spend our nights in Golgotha." We glow 
with fervors of feeling ; we rejoice with 
meditative enthusiasm ; we are stirred by 
sermons and lifted in emotion by the solemn 
voices of our sacred songs. Then in a 
vague and aimless way we go forth in long- 
ing toward some large service for our Lord. 
We dream, perhaps, that some day we may 
do some great thing for him. And then 
we straightway forget that the chances for 
the highest service are just as numerous as 
are little children about our way. Wash- 
ington Irving tells somewhere a story about 
a man who determined that he would jump 
over a great mountain rather than walk 
over it. So he took a run of three miles to 
gather impetus, and when he reached the 
mountain could only sit down and rest, hav- 
ing no strength to jump. So we sometimes 



A CHANCE FOR SERVICE, 147 

gather ourselves in desire and emotion for 
some huge and impossible service, and, 
uselessly exhausting ourselves, refuse quiet- 
ly to walk into the daily opportunities open- 
ing along our way. It is worth the learning 
to be willing to walk where we cannot jump. 

Christ said: Feed my lambs. Quietly 
feed them, then. The children are all 
around you. The household is a place of 
the highest and largest service. What 
greater thing can any person do than, tak- 
ing the parent's duty, train a child for a 
useful life on earth and for the heavenly 
glory ? The Sabbath-school is a place of 
service. What larger opportunity can any 
person want than that of teaching the im- 
pressible minds and hearts of children the 
great truths of the kingdom ? 

It was a bitter Winter's day. Little Pat 
was standing behind the board on which 
lay his papers, waiting to sell them. A 
bright-faced and tender-hearted girl stepped 
up and bought one, and as she laid the 
money down she kindly asked, " Arn't you 
very cold ?" " I was till you passed by," 



148 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

returned the boy. Exquisite answer. Her 
kind word had warmed through and 
through the little fellow's heart. Go thou 
and do likewise. 

He who makes a child's heart brighter 
pleases and serves his Lord. He who said, 
Feed my lambs, said also, He that receiv- 
eth one such little child receiveth me; and 
he who said that, said also, Inasmuch as ye 
did it to one of the least of these ye did it 
unto me. 

He who serves a little child, for Jesus' 
sake, right in that service shall serve his 
Lord as well. How large a chance for ser- 
vice in the lowliest life ! 



WITH BOTH HANDS EARNESTLY* 

IT was a sad time in which the burden of 
the Lord pressed upon the prophet Mi- 
cah. It Was a time of degeneracy, idola- 
try, public corruption ; evil was rising like 
a tide ; it was sweeping everything before 
it. " Woe is me," the prophet cries, "for I 
am as when they have gathered the summer 
fruit, as the grape gleaning of the vintage, 
The good man is perished out of the earth 
and there is none upright among men, and 
all lie in wait for blood ; they hunt every 
man his neighbor, with a net. That they 
may do evil with both hands earnestly, the 
prince asketh and the judge asketh for a re- 
ward." 

It is well for us to take note of the way 

* This text, and to some extent the treatment, was suggested 
to me by a very admirable sermon on the same text by the Rev. 
Dr. Raleigh, which I advise everybody to read, 

I4Q 



1 50 HINTS FOR THE CHRIS TIA N II FE. 

in which evil works "with both hands 
earnestly," and see to it that we work on 
the other side for our Christ " with both 
hands earnestly. ,, 

Some professing Christians work with 
neither hand. They have hands but they 
handle not, feet have they but they walk 
not. They are professing Christians. They 
have taken upon themselves the solemnest 
of vows. They have adjured themselves 
before presences and by sacred services, 
certainly as binding and momentous as is 
the oath exacted in a court of law, false- 
ness to which we call perjury, that they 
would " walk together in brotherly love as 
becomes the members of a Christian 
church, that they would not forsake the as- 
sembling of themselves together ; that they 
would endeavor to turn their kindred and 
acquaintance to the Saviour, to holiness 
and to eternal life ; that they would, accord- 
ing to their ability and opportunity as faith- 
ful stewards of the Lord, do good to all 
men, especially in helping to extend the 
gospel in its purity and power to the whole 



WITH BOTH HANDS EARNESTLY. 151 

human family." But as far as one can see, 
they seem to think, as a man told me flatly 
the other day, that a promise made to the 
church amounts to nothing. 

They have many excuses. Business is 
very pressing or home cares are very ab- 
sorbing. They have not been noticed as 
they should have been. They are very 
diffident. They have no talent. They 
have no influence. They are afraid they 
would do more harm than good. If 
they were placed as is such a one, or 
if they were gifted as is such other 
one, they surely would, but, being as they 
are and being who they are, it cannot be 
expected that they should keep their prom- 
ise. 

How sad a fact it is that, here in this 
world, ruined except as Christ saves it — that 
among so many standing on the very 
threshold of the kingdom, waiting for the 
kindly word, waiting for the grasp of wel- 
come, ready to be stirred into the new life 
by a personal and loving witnessing for 
Christ's gospel, there are professing Chris- 



152 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

tians who are working with neither hand, 
There are some Christians working with 
one hand. That is immensely better than 
not to work with either. In this needy- 
world no stroke of Christian work, how 
bungling and slight soever, can be well 
spared. I thank God for every one-handed 
worker even. But such are almost always 
Christians who have no steady and con- 
stant grip that holds. Such are intermit- 
tent Christians. They are tremendous in 
a revival. They will take fire easily and 
flame and work at a great rate. They will 
be " instant in season and out of season " 
for a while. But when the impulse has 
died away, somehow they die away with it, 
they cannot be depended on, they lack 
steadiness, they lose grip. So is it with the 
Sunday school, so it is with the prayer 
meeting, so is it with the church service. 
Such Christians are like the pea in the 
tricks of legerdemain. Now you see them 
and now you don't. They are one-handed. 
They cannot get a grip that holds. 

Now I do affirm that the Christian who 



WITH BOTH HANDS EARN E STL V. 153 

gives himself the Lord's service thus only to 
with one hand does vastly more and better 
than the Christian who stands idle, working 
with neither hand. Some service is always 
better than none. A class gathered and 
taught for a single Sunday is better than a 
class never taught. One word spoken for 
Christ is better than no word. Occasional 
attendance at the prayer meeting or at the 
Sabbath services is better than non-attend- 
ance. Urging onward a Christlike plan 
for a little while is better than never urging 
it on at all. It is not the best sort of ser- 
vice; but it is better than nothing. Chris- 
tians using one hand for their Lord are bet- 
ter than those who use neither. 

Some Christians lend to the service of 
their Lord both hands. Ah, God bless them 
— the two-handed workers, the workers of 
grip and constancy. They are Christians 
who are at work under fair skies and 
under foul. They are Christians who are at 
work whether the tide runs out or runs in. 
They stand in their places and seize their 
duty, whether the spiritual thermometer 



154 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

rises to blood heat or falls down below the 
zero and they must work in bitter weather. 
They understand that the Lord should be 
worshipped on a wet Sunday as well as on 
a dry. They stand by the Sabbath school 
and keep it going. They, when the blood 
is sluggish, chafe the chilled limbs of the 
church by their prayers and labors until the 
chilled limbs grow warm again. They stand 
by their duty in their own church, on whose 
altar they have laid their solemn pledge, 
and go not roaming round to other altars, 
neglecting service here because they are 
engaged in service there. They neglect not 
the gift that is in them. They do not man- 
acle their hands by hindering excuses. 
They pray, they work, they give as God has 
prospered them. They do not do one 
thing and, because they have done one, 
refuse to do two things, three things or a 
dozen things. They say, " Let me do any- 
thing, everything, for my Lord Christ. 
Here are both my hands consecrated to His 
service." Ah, God bless them, these two- 
handed workers, the joy and solace of the 






WITH BOTH HANDS EARNESTL Y. 155 

pastor's heart — these on whom he leans, as 
waking in the night watches praying for 
the church; he counts on and thanks God 
for and rejoices in them. Ah, God bless them 
again, these two handed workers. Distance 
does not scare them, rain does not frighten 
them, cold does not chill them, hindrances 
do not baffle them, distractions do not dis- 
tract them. They have taken hold with 
both hands and so they keep hold. " Hea- 
ven's best blessing be on them," every pas- 
tor says, and I am sure that the angels who 
stand about the throne, and even He who 
sitteth on the throne, and who yet walketh 
amid the golden candlesticks of His church 
answers, " So let it be, Amen, Amen." 

But consider further, that looking at the 
tactics cf evil and learning from them, it is 
not enough that we do service for our 
Christ even with both hands. Evil is at 
work with both hands earnestly. So we 
must be for Jesus. That is what we need 
as much as the two-handed service — the 
earnest love behind it, which shall give to 
all our duty strange delightsomeness and 



156 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

glow, and make it burn its way to victory. 
This is our sorest, deepest need. We can- 
not get it of ourselves, but we can get it 
given us. It is the ministry of the Holy 
Spirit to furnish us with just this heart- 
touching, heart- compelling earnestness. 
Shall we not get it given ? 



THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 

THAT is a very great Scripture ; this is 
the victory that overcometh the world, 
even your faith. 

Too frequently we read it wrong. I 
read it thus, for many years. I was wont 
to read it, " This is the victory that over- 
cometh the world, even your fight." It is 
not fight, however, which overcomes, but 
faith. It was thus I discovered the real 
meaning of the Scripture : 

It was one wintry day. The ground was 
snow-covered. I was passing along the 
street. My child, a little girl, was coasting 
with her sled. Some rude boys seized her 
sled. She had been in tussle with them. 
She could do nothing with the boys of her- 
self ; they were too much for her. Just 
then she saw me coming round the corner. 

i57 



I 5 8 HIN 7 S FOR THE CHRIS TIA N LIFE. 

Immediately she left the boys, sled, every- 
thing, and ran to me. "Papa," said she, 
" I want my sled." Then she was quite sure 
that she possessed it, because she knew 
that I was mightier than the boys, and 
could get it for her, and would. That was 
the victory which overcame the world of 
that childish trouble — even her faith. She 
put the whole matter in my hands, and by 
her faith in me, was conqueror. 

Since then I have read this Scripture as 
it stands. The victory that overcometh 
is that of faith. Toward the temptations, 
toward the trials, toward the troubles of 
our lives, we are as helpless in ourselves 
as was my little daughter toward the boys 
who had seized her toy. Toward the temp- 
tations, toward the troubles, toward the 
trials of our lives, we may be as conquer- 
ing as was my little daughter toward those 
boys. It is not needful that we be van- 
quished Christians. There is for us infinite 
resource. 

It is faith, however, that unlocks it, and 
not fight. Carry your pain or peril to the 



THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 159 

Lord, in the same definite, actual way in 
which my child carried her captured sled 
to me, and the might of Christ is pledged 
you. This is the secret of victorious Chris- 
tian living. It was Paul's secret. " The 
life which I now live in the flesh I live by 
the saith of the Son of God." 



A COMMON ERROR. 

THAT the Christian life is all in the be- 
ginning. I am sure that the general 
thought, while it is not too much concerned 
about the beginning of Christianity in the 
soul — because it cannot be too much con- 
cerned about it — is not enough anxious 
about its subsequent development. It 
would have been just as wise for the an- 
cient racer, after he had gone through the 
training process, and stripped himself for 
the contest, and entered the arena, and run 
on three steps, to have stopped there and 
declared the race won and himself entitled 
to the prize. Why, the judge would answer 
the race is but begun. Your preparation 
may have been assiduous and admirable, 
but it is the law of the arena that the 
entire course must be accomplished and 

1 60 



A COMMON ERROR. 161 

the prize adjudged as you shall have car- 
ried yourself around the whole circle. The 
race itself is the only test of your prepara- 
tion and beginning. 

But somehow we have too generally 
come to think that if we can only get a 
man to acknowledge his sinfulness and 
walk for a time in darkness, and then pass 
out into a better state of feeling ; to break 
forth in joy and songfulness; to see new 
light in the sun, and fresh greenness in the 
grass; to profess trust in Jesus Christ — that 
then the whole race is run, the victor's 
crown is on the brow. 

Now it may be that a man passing 
through such an experience has become a 
Christian, and it may be he has not. You 
cannot predicate Christianity altogether 
upon feeling. It is not all fervors, and rap- 
tures, and high excitements, and suffusions 
of sentiment. These may be the glorious 
door into the noble Christian life, and they 
may be the door into delusion. Christi- 
anity is deeper than feeling. Christianity 
is a changed nature. To be Christian is to 



162 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, 

be a new creation in Christ Jesus. Chris- 
tianity is the setting of the purposes to- 
wards God ; it is resolute determination to 
arrange our action with, and not athwart, 
the will of God ; it is living as ever in our 
great Taskmaster's eye. And so the only 
test of the truth of the beginning is the 
whole race succeeding. By their fruits ye 
shall know them, said the Saviour. The 
genu ; neness of the new life is to be judged 
of by what you do each day in your busi- 
ness, in your family, amid your pleasures — 
not so much by what you thought you felt 
on some dim day years back. Christianity 
is more life than a feeling. If the life bloom 
be other than Christian the strong pre- 
sumption must be that the root out of which 
the life issues is other than Christian. 

It is the Spring time, and I want flowers 
in my garden. I go to a seed store and ask 
for hyacinth bulbs. Unless my sense of 
smell be acute, the man may sell me onions 
instead of hyacinth bulbs. They look very 
much alike. I take them home and plant 
them, and water them, and watch them. If 



A COMMON ERROR. 163 

instead of the perfumed pyramid of flowers 
I get some weed or vegetable, then I am 
sure I have not planted hyacinths. So it is 
with Christianity. Unless the bloom be 
Christian it is certain that the bulb is not. 
The only test of saintship is endurance in 
saintship. The beginning is not everything 
in Christianity. 



CHRIST OUR ADVOCATE. 

HE is an Advocate sharing our own na- 
ture. 

There are two ways of help. One way- 
is worth little. The other is worth every- 
thing. 

When the fight is going on, the General, 
standing in some cistant and sheltered 
place, may command his troops to rush on- 
ward, toward the front. Possibly they may 
go. But the power of such command is 
surely something very different from the 
power of the call of sympathy, as when be- 
fore the siege of Mons, the Duke of Argyle, 
seeing his men faltering, pushed among 
them, open-breasted, and exclaimed, "You 
see, brothers, I have no concealed armor, I 
am equally exposed with you. I shall re- 
quire none to go where I refuse to venture. 

164 



CHRIST UR AD VO'CA TE. 165 

Remember you contend for the liberties of 
Europe, and for the honor of your nation, 
which shall never suffer by my behavior, 
and I hope the character of a Briton is as 
dear to every one of you." Is it wonderful 
that the faltering ceased, that the work was 
carried ? 

There is slight help in that word " Go," 
from some one standing outside the 
difficulty and danger. There is immense 
help in that word " Come," from some one 
standing with us, confronting the same dif- 
ficulty and danger. The last way of help 
is the only real way. 

There was a boy beginning school. The 
teacher put him at a book most difficult for 
a boy. It was a volume of history. It was 
one of those dreary books consisting of is- 
olated facts, piled together in no other or- 
der than the chronological; no more like 
a real history than a pile of split rails, 
lying by the roadside, is like a tree. That 
boy, now a man has never forgotten the 
kind of despair with which he sat down be- 
fore that task. He was at the Greece por- 



1 66 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, 

tion of it, and the page was full of Doric, 
Ionic and Corinthian architecture. The 
words were dim with mist. He could not 
understand. Now, his mother might have 
said, " My son, learn your lesson," and 
chastised him if he did not. She did no 
such thing. She said to him instead, " Come, 
my son, let us learn the lesson." Then, 
putting away whatever her hands were filled 
with, she would compel her large, bright, 
womanly faculties down to the measure of 
his weak and meagre ones. She would 
make the dull words of that page luminous 
with explanation. She would hunt out and 
chase away his ignorances and difficulties. 
She would draw out on paper what the boy 
could not get into his head, except he saw 
it, until the dreary history began to glow 
with interest as the boy's understanding 
fastened on what it told so dimly for a 
child's mind. That mother did not say, Go, 
she said Come, and standing there, identified 
herself with her child, and so gradually 
lifted him upward and onward. 

This is but meagre illustration of the 



CHRIST OUR AD VOCA TE. 167 

great truth of Christ's identification with 
us. He is divine, yet human. He stands with 
us in our nature. He is not an advocate 
managing our case coldly and from- a point 
outside of it. He is an advocate standing 
with us where we are; so to speak coming 
down out of His divinity and taking upon 
Himself our weakness and brokenness. 
He does not say, " Go;" he says, " lam 
sharer with you, come with me." 

And out of this position or identification 
and share and sympathy, Christ has never 
passed. The nature which He took upon 
Himself when He lay a babe in Hie mother's 
arms in Bethlehem, He keeps upon Himself 
risen now into the heavens, seated upon 
the universal throne. 

You remember that when Paul was com- 
ing to Damascus, intent on the persecution 
of the Church, and the light brighter than 
an oriental sun at noonday stiuck him 
down, he heard a voice saying, Saul ! Saul ! 
why persecutest thou me? and he replies, 
Who art thou Lord ? The voice came down 
to him out of the sky saying, I am Jesus 
of Nazareth whom thou persecutest. 



168 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

This was a most touching proof, as it 
has seemed to me, of the thorough iden- 
tification of our great Advocate with us 
in our humanity. For what was Naz- 
areth ? It was the meanest town in Pal- 
estine. It was esteemed the off-scouring 
and disgrace of the country. It was 
the town about which the proverb went 
about, Can any good come out of Naz- 
areth ? The most cutting gibe which they 
could fling at Jesus during His life on earth 
was just this, that He was a Nazarene. 
And we find Him at the right hand of God, 
Jesus of Nazareth still. 

He wears in heaven the very titles He 
wore on earth ; He keeps yet to what men 
would call the disgrace of his earthly state. 
He has severed no tie which bound him to 
the poorest and the meanest, though now 
upon His brow there flashes the diadem of 
the universe. He is the same Christ, stand- 
ing in our nature to-day in heaven as liter- 
ally as when He sank there at the well's 
mouth in Samaria. Christ is our brother, 
and standing in brotherhood with us, He is 



CHRIST OUR AD V OCA TE. i6g 

our Advocate. Here surely is certainty of 
sympathy, of infinite regard. 

We have an Advocate armed with a pre- 
vailing plea. The Scripture about this title 
smacks of court forms. We are on trial at 
the bar of God. Every human soul is in 
such a case. The definition of sin compels 
us to face this mighty fact. According to 
the Scriptures, sin is not a misfortune into 
which a man has somehow blamelessly 
fallen. According to the Scriptures, sin is 
not a disease to the contagion of which man 
has somehow exposed himself. Accord- 
ing to the Scriptures sin is the transgression 
of the law. God is law-giver. God, as law- 
giver, has promulged law and sanctioned it 
with penalty. It is a perfect law, since God 
who gave it is perfect. It is an unchange- 
able law, since God who gave it is unchange- 
able. It is an inexorable law, for being 
perfect and unchangeable, it can make but 
one demand, viz,, perfect obedience to its 
perfect requirements. If man present no 
such answer of complete obedience, then 
only this can follow, that the penalties of 



170 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

the law blaze forth. And since God has 
given this perfect, unchangeable, inexora- 
ble law, He must execute its penalties or 
stultify Himself. 

Now sin is the transgression of this law, 
and man is sinner because he has trans- 
gressed it. He has not returned the answer 
of an unflawed obedience ; he has refused 
obedience. The conscience is proof of 
this. Conscience is God's vicegerent. When 
it has said, Thou oughtest, the man has 
answered, I will not. Thus man stands 
in God's great court arraigned ; the law is 
against him, conscience is against him, he 
is speechless — helpless. But now we have 
an Advocate armed with a prevailing plea. 
What is His plea ? Himself ; he is one 
with us; he is our brother; he stands in 
our nature. But like humanity in all else, 
He is unlike humanity in this, — he is not a 
transgressor of the law. He is a keeper of 
it ; He has met its requirements ; He has 
suffered, and exhausted the penalties of it 
This is His plea in the presence of its vio- 
lated majesty — Himself. While man is 



CHRIST OUR AD VOCA TE. 171 

condemned before the law, because he has 
no plea to offer, the law itself is condemned 
in the presence of our Advocate, because He 
has every plea to offer — Himself. The law 
is satisfied in Him, because He has endured 
its penalties. The law is honored in Him, 
because He has perfectly obeyed it. The 
plea prevails. God can be just, and yet the 
Justifier. Every man and woman who by 
faith will gather within the shelter of that 
plea, is saved forever more. 



THE FATHERS HOUSE. 

IN my Father's house are many mansions, 
said Christ to the disciples. Let us think 
of some of the truths these words imply. 

// is a house of the Living. Through every 
one of these most precious verses here- 
abouts pulses, as the blood does heart- 
driven through the arteries, the truth of the 
other and the blessed life. The Father's 
house — house ? that is the place for the 
living ; tombs are places for the dead. The 
Father's house in which the dwellers live ; 
the many mansions through which the 
dwellers range ; the promise of intimate 
and constant companionship, " Where I am 
there ye shall be also," — all these words 
are figures of being. They imply and de- 
clare the truth of a veritable, grand, strong, 
joyous life. 

Materialists may so affirm, but this pres- 

172 



THE FA THER'S HOUSE. 173 

ent life is not the whole of life. It is but a 
small arc of life's great circle which dips 
downward here. These passing days, these 
experiences of joy and sorrow, these chang- 
ing radiances of success and glooms of 
failure, are but the variously carved and 
colored vestibule of the great eternal Tem- 
ple. 

Toward this truth of the immortal life 
there is the pointing of many arguments 
and analogies. Here, for instance, is some 
creature — the horse ; the dog ; the eagle, 
beating the distant blue with his strong 
pinions. For that creature, so far as we 
can see, there is an open sphere and 
chance commensurate with its capacity. 
It can exhaust its utmost capability of 
being in this present. It can find 
full food and furnishing for its lower 
nature. Enough for it the grass, the sun, 
the air, and the simple chance to be among 
them. But with man there is immeasurable 
difference. We overmeasure this present. 
The smallest soul is vaster than the world. 
There is nothing in the whole world to 



174 HINTSFOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

quiet the hunger of the smallest soul. I 
have seen oaks set in boxes ; but, pitiable 
pigmies because they had not root-room. 
We are like the trees planted in a box you 
can place in your parlor upon the window 
ledge. Men are hindered, men are cramped. 
" Toward men," says one, " there is so utter 
a disparity as to be ludicrous, were it not 
unspeakably sad, between his vast capaci- 
ties and desires on the one hand, and his 
narrow stage and brief span of living on 
the other." There are those WDrds of New- 
ton which every school-boy knows, how in 
this little life he could only say, " I seem to 
myself to be but as a child, picking up but 
here and there a shell or pebble on the 
shore, while the great ocean of truth is all 
unexplored before me/' This is the ques- 
tion, Does God work falsely toward our 
longings ? Does he implant them for the 
sake of disappointing them ? Must Sir 
Isaac always stay a child ? Does death 
quench him ? May no ship of human in- 
vestigation ever push out upon those un- 
known waves ? Nay, God does not work 



THE FA THEFS HOUSE. 175 

falsely. Men need another life to satisfy 
the longings this life has started, but can- 
not still. 

There is a chrysalis. Some are hanging 
now in my study. I have placed them 
there, waiting for their maturity, to see the 
sort of life that shall come out of them. It 
was a low worm-life the creature had 
months ago. It could not fly; it could not 
move swiftly; it could only lie upon its leaf 
and eat. Then when its time came, it spun 
itself a kind of tomb. It hung it by slen- 
der threads dangling from the tree-branch. 
It laid itself within it, and with doors of 
silk shut out the winter cold. Now it 
waits there. A strange change has passed 
upon it. It is a worm no more; it is a 
chrysalis. But a change stranger still shall 
come to it. It shall issue, a winged crea- 
ture, glorious with colors, scaling the lofti- 
est flower for the honey which shall be its 
food. 

Men say, " See there, do you think that 
God would do that for an insect and not do 
it for a man ? This is the worm-life; the 



176 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, 

tomb is the human chrysalis. Beyond it 
there must be ampler life, nobler suste- 
nance, better being." 

Then, too, there is the other argument 
springing from rewards and punishments. 
Not here do the scales swing evenly. Not 
in this life does the Psalmist question, 
which must often be ours as well, get an- 
swered, " Lord, how long shall the wicked 
triumph ? How long shall they utter and 
speak hard things ? Yet they say the Lord 
shall not see, neither shall the God of 
Jacob regard it." Intertwined with our 
deepest natures, there is a feeling indestruc- 
tible that the Lord does see — that the God 
of Jacob must regard. The good — that 
which ought to be, must triumph over the 
evil — that which ought not to be. It does 
not perfectly in this life. There must be 
another life in which it shall. 

Such are a few, hastily outlined, of the 
many arguments and analogies which point 
toward the life to come. But, when the 
shadow of death falls black and chill 
around us; when those we love go forth 



THE FA THER S HO USE. 177 

into the darkness, and though we call ever 
so passionately, nothing but the echo of 
our cry comes back; when we count the 
stealing years; when men feel that their 
noon has passed, and that only the western 
windows of their lives are open to them; 
when the fingers of disease are tugging at 
their heart-strings, breaking them one by 
one, then it cannot be denied that there are 
troops of sad analogies which seem to 
point toward our eternal setting. 

Drifts of blossoms whiten the apple tree 
in the spring sunshine, but only compara- 
tively few go on successfully into fruitage. 
Why not thus with men ? The emergence 
of the larva into the butterfly seems to be 
a grand exception to the usual order. Why 
are we to argue from the exception ? What 
are we to say to the terribly preponderating 
rule ? And then, besides, in the chrysalis 
there has been no real and thorough death 
— simply change and dormancy. Within 
our present horizon human life does not 
pass downward into death and then up- 
ward into resurrection; it simply passes 



178 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, 

downward into death. What can we do 
but ask ourselves, and wait and wonder 
after all ? 

But it is not needful that we waste our 
time and thought in argument and counter- 
argument. We know we have one master- 
ful reason for our faith. Christ brought 
life and immortality to light. We have seen 
Him one of ourselves, a sharer in our na- 
ture, entering life as we do, through the 
door of birth. We nave seen him die as 
one of us would die, fastened to a cross 
and with the spear thrust through His 
heart. We have seen Him buried, as some 
day we shall be, when our time comes. And, 
then we have seen Him burst the bars of 
the tomb and the bonds of death. It is 
death's Victor who is speaking. He says, 
Let not your hearts be troubled. He says, 
In my Father's house are many mansions. 
He says, " I will lift you thither." 

Therefore even the tomb startles not. 
Death is not state; it is transition. The 
Father's House is a house of the living. 

Also the Father's House is a House En- 
during. 



THE FA THER y S HO USE. 1 79 

Change — that is the law here. All is in 
constant flux and flow. What we call stable 
turns, at last, to instability. 

I read lately of a lighthouse anchored on 
a reef on the Jersey shore — one of the most 
important along that difficult line of coast 
— whose bright flame has saved many a 
mariner from wreck. But in twenty years 
the tide-line has climbed upward to that 
lighthouse many feet, and now the waves 
are undermining it. What men had built 
so strongly is getting swiftly changed to 
weakness. 

I have gazed upward at the Swiss Aiguil- 
les, pushing their rocky needle-points 
thousands of feet into the blue. But even 
granite cannot stand unchanged, though it 
force itself above the mountains. Every 
year the frosts pry huge splinters off, and 
the vast ice-files of the glaciers grind the 
mountains down. 

Here is a crowd of people thronging one 
of our great streets, jostling each other, 
pushing onward, intent on business or 
pleasure. Stand amid that crowd and think 



180 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

ahead but ten short years, and that street, 
so thronging now, would be passed along 
but by a little straggling company, did not 
others come to fill the places of the multi- 
tudes whom death shall by that time have 
swept onward into the unreturning change. 
But think a moment of the companions of 
your boyhood; how many are represented 
now by graves folded upon the hillside, 
rather than by living men ! Then, too, what 
a king Change is over the narrow space of 
this present life. How position and posses- 
sion come and go, and go and come, or go 
and refuse again to come. How much that 
we think diamond has changed to dew, and 
vanished in our grasp. 

Listen to these words : For we know that 
if our earthly house of this tent be taken 
down, we have a building of God — a house 
not made of hands — eternal in the heavens. 

This is the picture in the words — a cara- 
van toiling along some desert country ; at 
last the night has come; the burdens are 
unbound from the camels' backs ; the tents 
are lifted, and the tired travelers rest be- 



THE FA THER S HO USE. 181 

neath them, while the night holds sway. 
But when the first rays of morning streak 
the east the travelers rouse themselves. 
The burdens are piled again upon the 
camels' backs; the tents are taken down ; 
and the little city which the stars saw dot- 
ting the desert sands is not. Such is the 
earthly life. We pitch our tents, then 
strike them, now here, now there — change. 

Some strong and noble dwelling founded 
upon a rock ; the winds blow and the 
floods beat but the house stands stable. 
It stands while a helpless infancy finds pro- 
tection in its walls. It stands when man- 
hood, weary with the fight of life, seeks a 
resting place within it. It stands when old 
age, helpless as infancy totters under the 
shadow of its roof. There it stands — a 
firm, fixed homestead, the heritage of the 
generations. , That is the Father's House ; 
more fixed, more firm ; a building of God 
eternal in the heavens. 

Also the Father's House is a house spa- 
cious. In my Father's House are many 
mansions — that is to say, dwelling places — 



182 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

abiding places. Read the words over, and 
a feeling of roominess comes to you at 
once. His is a House of width, and chance 
and opportunity. 

" How blest we should be, we have always believed, 
Had we really achieved, what we nearly achieved.' ' 

But we have not. The ideal haunts. 
The ideal is never caught. Baffled are we — 
beaten back, at best but prisoners of the 
actual. Longings are large but chance is 
small. Perhaps sickness chains you. You 
can only hear the hurry of busy feet com- 
ing past your chamber door. Perhaps pov- 
erty hampers you. Life is but a daily bat- 
tle for the simple leave to be. Perhaps you 
find yourself in some hard prison, builded 
by the deeds of others. I have known 
many such. Women tied to drunken hus- 
bands; life is weighted; it has missed all its 
wings of hope. O for a breathing place, 
you say. I am stifled, I am hungry for 
culture, spiritual, intellectual. I am a bird 
with wings clipped. I can only tread the 
ground, when my feeling tells me I was 
made for the upper air. 



THE FA THER'S HOUSE. 183 

But here is a message of chance and 
range. The father's House is spacious. It 
is no narrow place. No cell is builded in 
it. It is no hovel. It is a palace with room 
added on to room; with grass and foun- 
tains and gardens, green and great. It is 
wider than your widest thought. Sickness 
cannot hamper there — " neither shall there 
be any more pain." Poverty cannot hinder 
there — its streets are gold, its gates are 
pearl. Hope cannot be blighted there — 
11 and God shall wipe away all tears from 
their eyes." Desire shall not stand knock- 
ing at any gate flung to and bolted, — " in 
my Father's House are many mansions." 
Room, spaciousness, chance and capacity 
for development — these belong to the 
Father's House. 

Also the Father's House is a House of 
Recognitions. We dwell here with divided 
hearts. Constantly are we called upon to 
make investment of our best treasure in 
the beyond. Surely sooner or later the 
shadow falls over every household. Death 
is mightier than marriage. He empties 



1 84 HINTS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 

cradles and you cannot tell him nay. 
Standing there at the tomb's door who can 
help the question, Shall we ever meet 
again ? Shall we meet in the sweetness and 
intimacy of personal knowledge ? Shall the 
broken tendrils which have been so clinging 
here ever be rejoined ? Shall heart find 
refuge again in the heart that matches it ? 
Shall we know each other there ? 

The Father's House is a House of Rec- 
ognitions. See how the fact comes out in 
all the figures of that noble and immortal 
life. House — that means the place of the 
home. Dwelling-places — abiding-places — 
these are but other figures of the home. 
Home — that means familyhood, and that 
means intercourse founded upon recogni- 
tion. The very terms of this revelation im- 
ply our knowledge of each other, the re- 
uniting of the old blessed earthly ties. 
The Father's House is a House of Recogni- 
tions. 



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